19 companies have signed an open letter to the EU's competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, claiming that Google is still abusing its dominance in the search engine market. In June last year, Google was found guilty of exploiting its monopoly of the search market to unfairly promote its Google Shopping service at the expense of competitors. It was fined €2.4 billion and ordered to end its unfair practices relating to its Google Shopping service. In response, Google Shopping was made into a separate company and forced to bid to appear in the search results, just like its competitors. However, the 19 signatories of the open letter say that this change has had little effect and that “harm to competition, consumers and innovation… has continued unabated”. If the EU finds that Google has not done enough to fix the problem, then it could be fined 5% of its daily turnover for each day that it failed to respond; a figure which currently adds up to around €3 billion. A spokesperson from Google strongly denies the letter's allegations, saying: “Our remedy complies with the European Commission's order. As required, comparison shopping services have the same opportunity as Google Shopping to show shopping ads from merchants on Google's search results pages.”
