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EU: Google has not responded to antitrust charge yet

 |  June 24, 2015

Google hasn’t yet responded to European Union charges that the US company skews search results to favor its own comparison-shopping service, the bloc’s antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said on Wednesday.

EU antitrust cops charged Google with violating the bloc’s laws in mid-April and gave the company ten weeks to respond to the allegations, escalating a five-year-old investigation.

Those ten weeks have now elapsed, but Google still has time to respond because it wasn’t immediately granted access to the EU’s case documents, Vestager said at a news conference.

Google can ask for an extension and may also request a hearing in front of regulators to better make its case.

Vestager also declined to give a new deadline for decisions in her agency’s high-profile tax investigations, which have ensnared at least four multinational companies including Apple and Amazon.com.

Full content: The Wall Street Journal

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