European Union slaps Google with $2.72 billion fine for manipulating search results

From PC World: Google abused its dominant position in the search engine market to illegally promote its comparison shopping service, the European Union's top antitrust authority ruled Tuesday, slapping the company with a €2.42 billion ($2.72 billion) fine.

The consequence could be still greater differences in the ways Google presents search results to users in the U.S. and to those in the EU.

The European Commission gave the the company 90 days to change its ways or face additional fines of up to 5 percent of average daily worldwide sales of parent company Alphabet for each day that the infringement continued.

The Commission's ruling targets the way Google uses its search service to promote another service, "Google Shopping", previously known as Google Product Search and Froogle.

Google gives its own service a prominent place in its general search results, above that of rival comparison shopping services, the Commission said, noting that even the most highly ranked competing service appears on average only on page four of Google's search results.

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