Report: Antitrust studies EC case against Google for new suits

MOSCOW, Jul 10 (PRIME) -- Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service is studying a case opened by the European Commission against Google and may discover new violations on the local market, Director Igor Artemyev said on Monday, business daily Vedomosti reported.

“We’re studying the European Commission’s case, and we share the same river, but follow two different runlets. We’ll see and, perhaps, we should investigate this runlet once again from the point of view of another breach. People are talking about it, and we can’t ignore it. We are getting familiarized with the practice of other countries,” Artemyev said.

The European Commission fined Google for a record 2.4 billion euros for abusing its dominance as a search engine and the U.S. company has 90 days to mend the breaches, or will pay the fine of 5% of annual turnover of its parent company Alphabet.

In 2015, Russian Internet giant Yandex complained to the local antimonopoly watchdog about Google’s dominance on the local market of application stores for Android devices. The U.S. company was found guilty and punished with 439 million rubles in total. In April, a court approved an amicable agreement between Google and the service, and the company was obliged to mend all breaches and pay the penalties.

(60.3792 rubles – U.S. $1)

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