As expected, the European Commission has sent a formal "Statement of Objections" to Google alleging the company has abused its dominant position in the EU's general search market by systematically favoring its own comparison shopping product in search results. The Commission believes this infringes EU antitrust rules because it "stifles competition and harms consumers."

Separately, the Commission has also opened an antitrust investigation into Google's Android offerings: "[It] will focus on whether Google has entered into anti-competitive agreements or abused a possible dominant position in the field of operating systems, applications and services for smart mobile devices."

Speaking today at the press conference in Brussels, the EU Commissioner in charge of competition policy, Margrethe Vestager, said: "dominance as such is not a problem. However, dominant companies have a responsibility not to abuse their powerful market position by restricting competition, either in the market where they are dominant or in neighboring markets." The specific allegation is that Google systematically gives favorable treatment to its comparison shopping product Google Shopping in its general search results pages.

Vestager emphasized that the Commission did not want to interfere in the design of the results screen, or to lay down how Google's search algorithms worked. "I think it will be difficult to supervise the algorithm," she said. Instead, it was "important to find something guided by principles, that leaves the algorithm and screen design as the responsibility of Google." Vestager said that she wanted to "work with principles that can be future-proofed." This is presumably to avoid a repeat of the EU's experience in its previous major anti-trust action against Microsoft, for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. In that case, the remedy—to use a browser ballot screen—had became largely redundant by the time it was finally implemented, since many users had already migrated to alternatives.

Establishing general principles would also allow them to be applied elsewhere, Vestager believes. "I think if infringement is proven, a case that focuses on shopping could potentially establish a broader precedent how we enforce EU competition rules in other instances if we find a favoring of services closely related to general search." She said that the European Commission was still "actively looking into the other markets—mapping, hotels, flight—to get a deeper understanding," before deciding whether to bring actions against Google for those too. In addition, the EU still has "concerns with regard to [Google's] copying of rivals' web content (known as 'scraping'), advertising exclusivity and undue restrictions on advertisers," so the company has plenty to worry about.

Google has published its first response to the European Commission's actions in a post on its European policy blog, entitled "The Search for Harm." It includes a variety of graphs showing visitors to travel and shopping sites in the main European markets to support its claim that: "While Google may be the most used search engine, people can now find and access information in numerous different ways—and allegations of harm, for consumers and competitors, have proved to be wide of the mark."

Throughout the press conference, Vestager emphasized that the European Commission's concerns were not about the market, but the actions of key players in it: "we're not here to create a market, to pick winners, we're here to enforce EU competition law." She said that it was of "tremendous importance to know that no matter what market, no matter what consumer behavior, there will be someone looking into [a company's] behavior if they're misusing their dominant position." And as she pointed out: "when complaints are made, we investigate them."

The Commission's press release points out that this latest action does not prejudge the outcome of its investigation. Vestager emphasized this would be based on facts, not on the nationality of the company involved: "This is a case for EU competition law, nothing to do with a company being European, US, Russian, Chinese, whatever."

Google now has 10 weeks to reply to the formal objections, and can then seek a hearing to present its defense. At the press conference, Vestager confirmed that, if it was not ultimately possible to reach an agreement that resolved the problems raised by the complainants and confirmed by the Commission's investigation, she would be prepared to impose a fine. Under EU anti-trust rules, in the case of Google, that could be as much as $6.6 billion.