EU: DuckDuckGo still critical of Google’s Android choice

Google announced which search engines have won an auction process it has devised for an Android “choice screen” as its response to an antitrust intervention by the region’s competition regulator.

The big winners of the initial auction, for the period March 1, 2020 to June 30, 2020, are pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo which gets one of three paid-for slots in all 31 European markets and a product called Info.com, which will also be shown as an option in all those markets. 

French pro-privacy search engine Qwant will be shown as an option to Android users in eight European markets. While Russia’s Yandex will appear as an option in five markets in the east of the region.

Despite participating in the process and winning a universal slot, DuckDuckGo told us it still does not agree with the pay-to-play approach.

“We believe a search preference menu is an excellent way to meaningfully increase consumer choice if designed properly. Our own research has reinforced this point and we look forward to the day when Android users in Europe will have the opportunity to easily make DuckDuckGo their default search engine while setting up their phones. However, we still believe a pay-to-play auction with only 4 slots isn’t right because it means consumers won’t get all the choices they deserve and Google will profit at the expense of the competition,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

Full Content: Tech Crunch

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