According to a source with direct knowledge of the matter, the company aims to avoid penalties from the European Union (EU) for highlighting its own services in hotel, flight and restaurant searches.
Google, the world’s most used search engine, has made various proposals to please rivals and EU regulators since it was accused of violating the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) in March last year. However, because competitors found these measures insufficient, the company had not yet implemented any of these suggestions.
The dispute pits Google against vertical search services (VSS), which focus on specific industries such as hotels, airlines and restaurants.
According to this new regulation, which has not been reported before, both Google’s own services and rival vertical search services will be shown together in search results. According to the news source, top-ranking rival search engines will appear on the screen by default.
Hotels, airlines, restaurants and transportation services that provide real-time data flow will be located just below or above the list of vertical search engines. It was stated that these changes will soon be implemented throughout Europe, priority will be given to accommodation searches, and then flights and other services will be added.
These changes may help satisfy the European Commission, the EU’s competition authority. Fines for DMA violations can be up to 10 percent of a company’s global annual revenue.
Google has been fined a total of 9.71 billion euros ($11.5 billion) since 2017 for various anti-monopoly violations in Europe.
