Google’s long battle with European antitrust regulators may be winding down but it won’t be over until the company’s rivals have their say. The Wall Street Journal reports that EU antitrust regulators are giving Google’s competitors four weeks to weigh in on its proposed antitrust settlement that would force Google to clearly label its own services in web results and to retrieve links to rival services on its search page.
The Journal says that Google’s latest proposal involves “displaying three sets of results from rival search engines in a box under its own shopping results,” which seems like a fairly significant concession on the company’s part. An industry group partially funded by Microsoft has already said that the proposed settlement doesn’t go far enough, however, and argues that “Google still doesn’t appear to have offered anything that will prevent it from systematically preferencing its own services and manipulating results.”
