Google Search Rivals Call on EU to Do Something
- Paul Thurrott
- Oct 07, 2021
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In an open letter, four of Google’s search rivals call on the EU to actually address the search giant’s dominance in a meaningful way.
“The Digital Markets Act [DMA] urgently needs to be adapted to prevent gatekeepers from suppressing search engine competition,” an open letter from DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Lilo, and Ecosia reads. “Specifically, the DMA should enshrine in law a requirement for a search engine preference menu that would effectively ban Google from acquiring default search access points of the operating systems and the browsers of gatekeepers.”
The search rivals also demand that the DMA would allow users to switch to new search engines at any time with one click. These changes, they say, would “finally lead to significant implications for competition in the search engine market and ensure there is real consumer choice online.”
It’s pretty clear that Google’s rivals are—understandably—tired of the glacial pace of the European Union and its regulatory agencies, which have opened multiple investigations into Google (and Apple) over several years, but with little to show for it. For example, the DMA referenced in the letter was proposed over a year ago with the goal of reining in so-called Internet gatekeepers like Google, but it’s been stuck in negotiations ever since.
And it does nothing to break up Google’s dominance in search: Google currently owns about 93 percent of the search market in that region.