The European Union's executive, the European
Commission, confirmed Thursday that Microsoft has filed a formal
antitrust complaint against Google's dominance in the Internet search-engine market.
"The commission takes note of the complaint and, as is the
procedure, will inform Google and will ask for its views on it,"
Amelia Torres, spokeswoman for EU competition commissioner Joaquin
Almunia said in a statement.
Microsoft's complaint feeds into an ongoing EU investigation into
Google's market dominance, and follows similar steps taken by other
companies - including Microsoft's German subsidiary ciao.de, an
online shopping portal.
"We are not surprised by this step from Microsoft," Google
spokesman Kay Oberbeck said in Hamburg. "We will continue the
discussions with the EU Commission and thereby explain our business
model," he added.
Wednesday, Microsoft Vice President and General Counsel Brad
Smith announced his company's initiative with a blog posting, where
he listed six examples of anti-competitive behaviour by Google.
Among the allegations, Smith said that Google is preventing
Microsoft's Bing search engine and Microsoft's Windows Phones from
accessing videos from YouTube, which Google bought in 2006.
Smith acknowledged that there would "be some who will point out
the irony" in Microsoft's actions, since over the last decade EU
antitrust authorities fined the United States company record amounts
for shutting out competitors in the computer software market.
