Russia: FAS probing Google, Yandex practices

Russian antitrust watchdog, Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS), is looking into the violations of country’s anti-monopoly law by some of the biggest search engines such as Google and Yandex, Russia’s Sputnik reported Monday.

An enquiry has been initiated into the matter after the European Commission fined Google €2.42 billion (US$2.85 billion) in June over the abuse of its dominant position in the search engine market. EC said Google preferred results from its own shopping services. The company has been told to stop the violations within three months or pay fine equivalent to 5% of its daily turnover.

The Russian anti-monopoly agency has said it was looking into the European Commission’s findings on Google.

“Undoubtedly, on our own initiative, we are studying how the search engine companies are behaving in Russia, whether they make preferential placements of their resources. This work is currently underway… We don’t have the analysis of the share [of the market] ready, but there are probably two dominants, Yandex and Google… FAS is analyzing the behavior of the largest players of the search engine market,” Elena Zaeva, the head of the agency’s Department for Regulation of Telecommunications and Information Technologysaid.

The FAS official noted that there had been no complaints similar to the one that prompted the European Commission to launch its case against Google.

In April, the FAS and Google ended their two-year long dispute over the US technology giant pre-installing its own applications on all Android devices sold in Russia, with Google agreeing to pay the fines and to refrain from restricting the installation of competitors’ applications, including on the home screen in default position.

Full Content: Sputnik News

Want more news? Subscribe to CPI’s free daily newsletter for more headlines and updates on antitrust developments around the world.