BRUSSELS — Google must offer more concessions to European Union regulators to escape huge fines linked to the way it runs its online search business, the bloc’s top antitrust official warned Wednesday.
“I concluded that the proposals that Google sent to us months ago are not enough to overcome our concerns,” Joaquín Almunia, the European Union competition commissioner, told a news conference here.
Mr. Almunia said he had written to Eric E. Schmidt, the company’s executive chairman, “asking Google to present better proposals, or improved proposals.”
The comments are a significant setback for Google, which has put its efforts into reaching a settlement with Mr. Almunia that would entail minimal disruption to the advertising linked to search services that delivers the vast majority of its revenue.
Google is especially strong in Europe, with more than 90 percent of the Internet search market in some countries, compared with about 70 percent in the United States.
Al Verney, a spokesman for Google, said the company’s proposal “clearly addresses their four areas of concern,” referring to the officials at the European Commission, which formally opened the inquiry in November 2010 and outlined its concerns in detail in May 2012. “We continue to work with the commission to settle this case,” Mr. Verney said.
The announcement by Mr. Almunia on Wednesday did not come entirely out of the blue.
When Mr. Almunia last spoke in detail about Google, in May, he strongly hinted, after reviewing feedback from companies and organizations involved, that the company would need to improve proposals made by Google late last year to settle the case.
The feedback was solicited to see if, among other issues, the proposed remedies addressed complaints that Google favored its own products in search results.
One of the major proposals from Google was that it would show links to the Web sites of competitors who offer specialized search services. In cases where Google sells advertising adjacent to search results for specific industries like restaurants and hotels, Google would provide a menu of at least three options for non-Google search services.
In addition, Google offered to label results that pointed to its own services — like Google Maps — as its own properties and separate them from general search results with a box. Google’s agreement would be legally binding for five years, and a third party, approved by the commission, would be put in place to monitor compliance.
Since May, Mr. Almunia has come under increasing pressure from Google rivals to devise a tougher set of remedies than the package that was made public in April.
Those rivals, including publishers, mapping and travel companies, have published a slew of studies to show the ineffectiveness of the deal that Google has offered so far.
“Google’s proposed commitments across the board retard rather than promote competition,” Thomas Vinje, a spokesman for Fairsearch Europe, a group of Google’s competitors, including the cellphone maker Nokia and the software titan Microsoft, said in a statement on Wednesday.
Mr. Vinje said that a survey his group had commissioned from two professors at the University of Illinois and University of San Francisco showed that Google’s proposals would attract the vast majority of searchers to the company’s own products and discourage them from visiting rivals.
Some rival companies have been pushing Mr. Almunia to demand solutions that could force Google to place their sites at the top of the results list in Google’s engine, in order to reach consumers who click most frequently on the first offering that they see.
“Google must be evenhanded,” 11 organizations including TripAdvisor and the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers wrote in a letter to Mr. Almunia in March. Google “must hold all services, including its own, to exactly the same standards, using exactly the same crawling, indexing, ranking, display and penalty algorithms,” they wrote.
A settlement with the European Union would allow Google to escape the long, expensive antitrust battles that Microsoft fought in Europe over its media player and server software during the past decade.
“I concluded that the proposals that Google sent to us months ago are not enough to overcome our concerns,” Joaquín Almunia, the European Union competition commissioner, told a news conference here.
Mr. Almunia said he had written to Eric E. Schmidt, the company’s executive chairman, “asking Google to present better proposals, or improved proposals.”
The comments are a significant setback for Google, which has put its efforts into reaching a settlement with Mr. Almunia that would entail minimal disruption to the advertising linked to search services that delivers the vast majority of its revenue.
Google is especially strong in Europe, with more than 90 percent of the Internet search market in some countries, compared with about 70 percent in the United States.
Al Verney, a spokesman for Google, said the company’s proposal “clearly addresses their four areas of concern,” referring to the officials at the European Commission, which formally opened the inquiry in November 2010 and outlined its concerns in detail in May 2012. “We continue to work with the commission to settle this case,” Mr. Verney said.
The announcement by Mr. Almunia on Wednesday did not come entirely out of the blue.
When Mr. Almunia last spoke in detail about Google, in May, he strongly hinted, after reviewing feedback from companies and organizations involved, that the company would need to improve proposals made by Google late last year to settle the case.
The feedback was solicited to see if, among other issues, the proposed remedies addressed complaints that Google favored its own products in search results.
One of the major proposals from Google was that it would show links to the Web sites of competitors who offer specialized search services. In cases where Google sells advertising adjacent to search results for specific industries like restaurants and hotels, Google would provide a menu of at least three options for non-Google search services.
In addition, Google offered to label results that pointed to its own services — like Google Maps — as its own properties and separate them from general search results with a box. Google’s agreement would be legally binding for five years, and a third party, approved by the commission, would be put in place to monitor compliance.
Since May, Mr. Almunia has come under increasing pressure from Google rivals to devise a tougher set of remedies than the package that was made public in April.
Those rivals, including publishers, mapping and travel companies, have published a slew of studies to show the ineffectiveness of the deal that Google has offered so far.
“Google’s proposed commitments across the board retard rather than promote competition,” Thomas Vinje, a spokesman for Fairsearch Europe, a group of Google’s competitors, including the cellphone maker Nokia and the software titan Microsoft, said in a statement on Wednesday.
Mr. Vinje said that a survey his group had commissioned from two professors at the University of Illinois and University of San Francisco showed that Google’s proposals would attract the vast majority of searchers to the company’s own products and discourage them from visiting rivals.
Some rival companies have been pushing Mr. Almunia to demand solutions that could force Google to place their sites at the top of the results list in Google’s engine, in order to reach consumers who click most frequently on the first offering that they see.
“Google must be evenhanded,” 11 organizations including TripAdvisor and the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers wrote in a letter to Mr. Almunia in March. Google “must hold all services, including its own, to exactly the same standards, using exactly the same crawling, indexing, ranking, display and penalty algorithms,” they wrote.
A settlement with the European Union would allow Google to escape the long, expensive antitrust battles that Microsoft fought in Europe over its media player and server software during the past decade.
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