This article is more than 1 year old

EU gives Google JUST WEEKS to submit stronger search biz concessions

Table decent offer soon or face formal charges, says Almunia

Google is being strong-armed by the competition wing of the European Commission to quickly come up with a revised and more palatable offer to fix for its alleged abuse of dominance in the search market.

It has weeks to respond, antitrust commissioner Joaquin Almunia told reporters today, according to Reuters.

Google's most recent attempt to wiggle away from damning claims that its 90 per cent hold on the 28-member bloc's search market stifled rivals unfairly was rejected by the EC in late December.

At the time, Almunia said the ad giant's offer wasn't good enough and warned "there is little time left" for Google to submit another package of concessions to his office.

But the competition chief said today that he was still waiting for Google's response to his decision.

"We need more and we need more not during the next year, we need more during the next weeks," he told reporters.

The Register sought comment from Almunia's office about this story, but it hadn't got back to us at time of writing.

In November, Google claimed that its most recent proposals involved "unprecedented and far-reaching changes to our continuously evolving search results" because it "didn’t want to spend a decade fighting over these issues".

We asked Google about what its next move would be with this case - the company has yet to respond. ®

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