Last week, I wrote a few articles for eWEEK discussing the antitrust complaint Microsoft filed with the European Commission, pillorying Google as an 800-pound gorilla in the world of search.
"We're concerned by a broadening pattern of conduct aimed at stopping anyone else from creating a competitive alternative," Brad Smith, Microsoft's senior vice president and general counsel, wrote in a March 30 statement posted on the Microsoft on the Issues blog. "We've therefore decided to join a large and growing number of companies registering their concerns about the European search market."
His posting argued that Google restricts other search engines from property cataloging YouTube videos in search results, that it prevents those YouTube videos from running well on Windows Phones, that it blocks access to book publishers' content and that it restricts advertisers' access to their own data.
In addition, Smith accused Google of contractually blocking "leading Websites in Europe from distributing competing search boxes" and discriminating against competitors by raising the price for prominent placement in Google advertisements.
The European Commission, of course, spent years chasing Microsoft around the block over supposed anti-competitive practices related to Internet Explorer. Eventually, Redmond executives relented to releasing a "Web browser choice screen" that gave Windows users in the European Union a selection of browsers other than IE.
Google didn't take Microsoft's EC filing very well.
"We're not surprised that Microsoft has done this, since one of their subsidiaries was one of the original complainants," a Google spokesperson wrote in a March 31 e-mail to eWEEK. "For our part, we continue to discuss the case with the European Commission, and we're happy to explain to anyone how our business works."
By "one of their subsidiaries," the spokesperson is referring to Ciao! from Bing, an online-community portal aimed at a handful of Western European markets. Back in February 2010, the European Commission notified Google that Ciao, along with U.K. price-comparison Website Foundem and French legal search engine ejustice.fr, had filed complaints about Google's effect on European search-engine competition. Foundem is a member of ICOMP, a lobbying group sponsored by Microsoft.
Is Microsoft's move surprising? Not really.
Redmond is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting its Bing search engine, in exchange for incremental market-share gains (which add up, to be fair; if you add Bing.com's share with what the search engine earns from powering Yahoo's back-end search, Microsoft can claim close to 30 percent of the market, according to research firm comScore).
At the same time, Microsoft is also attempting to carve out a presence in the smartphone market with Windows Phone 7. Several rivals occupy that territory: Research In Motion, Apple, Google and (soon) Hewlett-Packard's re-launched Palm franchise. But it's Google's burgeoning market share that seems to have everyone else concerned.
Lastly, there's also the business cloud side of the equation. Google and Microsoft have been battling for several quarters over government and corporate contracts for their respective cloud IT services. In November 2010, Google filed a lawsuit against the federal government, alleging that the Department of the Interior unfairly restricted its bid to update its email and messaging system in favor of Microsoft's BPOS-Federal suite. That action alone hints at the animosity level between the two companies.
So a lawsuit with the European Commission is just another twist in what promises to be a long battle, one in which both sides seem willing to do anything to gain even a small advantage over the other.
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