Google Made Changes to one of its Services in Reaction to the Investigation of the Office

Last year, the Office for the Protection of Competition investigated possible abuse of a dominant position by Google Czech Republic, s.r.o, its parent company Google International LLC and Google Ireland Ltd. The investigation was terminated following changes made by Google to its Google Merchant Centre service that resolved the competition concerns of the Office.

The Office found that the possible abuse of a dominant position could consist of the application of different conditions for identical or comparable performance in the provision of the Google Merchant Centre service to individual market participants, which put some of them at a competitive disadvantage.

Google operates a free service called Google Merchant Centre/GMC (also referred to as Google Shopping). GMC serves as a central database of information about promoted goods, while detecting errors and correcting data and metadata about the goods of the users of the service concerned. An active Google Merchant Centre account is therefore a necessary prerequisite for paid product promotion via Google Ads. However, some types of goods are not supported by GMC and cannot be advertised through GMC, such as variable-priced goods, i.e., also gold and silver bullion, investment gold and silver (marked as "Currency" category).

The complainant, whose complaint was investigated by the Office, had its account and promotion of sales of investment gold and silver and their accessories suspended, even though the same or comparable goods from other undertakings were available on the GMC service. The complainant brought the situation to Google's attention through Google's dedicated tool; however, no remedy was implemented.

The preliminary investigation found that the online sale of investment gold and silver and their accessories may be heavily dependent on Google's services and that the GMC service does indeed contain unsupported content offered by other undertakings in the market concerned. At the same time, the Office detected that the GMC terms of service may have been applied inconsistently and in a discriminatory manner, with some undertakings being allowed to advertise unsupported content despite being warned or offer identical goods that were prohibited to others. Such conduct has created a significantly unequal conditions in the online market for investment gold and silver and their accessories in the Czech Republic. Such application of the condition concerned has a direct impact on competition between undertakings and, as a result, limits the choice of end consumers.

In response to the Office's request, Google has adopted several measures to address the Office's concerns. In particular, a review of the keywords used to detect unsupported content on the GMC service was carried out, a manual review of the records on the service was also conducted and a procompetitive training was provided to the staff administering the GMC service.

The Office assessed the measures proposed and implemented by Google as sufficient. Administrative proceeding was not initiated and the case was closed through competition advocacy.

Press Unit of the Office

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