Google antitrust claims dropped by FTC

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 20:30:00 +0000

WASHINGTON -- Google is agreeing to license certain patents to mobile phone rivals and stop a practice of including snippets from other websites in its search results as part of a settlement to end a 19-month investigation into the search leader's business practices, the Federal Trade Commission said Thursday.

U.S. antitrust regulators added that they have found no evidence to claims that Google unfairly favors its own services in search results.

Google did agree to license patents deemed to be "essential" for rival mobile devices such as Apple Inc.'s iPhone, Research in Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry and smartphones running on a Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software. Some of the patents in question came as part of Google's $12.4 billion acquisition of device maker Motorola Mobility Holdings earlier this year.

Regulators say Google is also promising that upon request, it will exclude snippets copied from other websites in its summaries of key information, even though the company had insisted the practice is legal under the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law. Despite the fair-use practice, Google already had scaled back on the amount of cribbing, or "scraping," of online content after business review site Yelp Inc. lodged one of the complaints that triggered the FTC investigation.

Google faces antitrust ultimatum

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 19:46:00 +0000

The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission has warned Google: settle or face a formal antitrust lawsuit, Bloomberg News reported. The FTC has been investigating the tech giant for over a year, looking into claims that Google has given its own services -- such as YouTube or Google Drive -- precedence over competitors in search results.

Bloomberg reported Monday:

For almost 20 months, the FTC has been probing whether Mountain View, California-based Google is abusing its dominance of the Internet and it’s prepared to file a case against the operator of the world’s largest search engine if the company fails to make an acceptable settlement proposal, the people said...

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Google antitrust claims dropped by FTC

Google faces antitrust ultimatum