Google Accused Of Abusing Market Position - Sky News

US officials are due to decide whether they should pursue Google for alleged monopoly abuses.

Critics say Google controls some 70% of the internet search market - and the advertising that goes along with it.

The Federal Trade Commission is also examining whether Google is exerting even more power in the mobile sector by controlling the Android operating system that is used in two-thirds of smartphones.

Google is accused of "scraping" content from other services like travel and restaurant reviews, while keeping consumers on its own sites.

It is also under fire for allegedly promoting its own services - including travel, restaurant reviews and YouTube videos - in its search results.

"These are practices which drive up prices and drive down competition," said Ben Hammer, whose Fairsearch coalition includes travel websites Expedia and Kayak, mobile phone maker Nokia and Microsoft.

Another concern for critics of the firm is the way the company limits how advertisers can manage ads with Google and its competitors.

"They remind me a lot of Microsoft in the 90s: massively arrogant, having the feeling they have the power to do anything they want," said consultant Rob Enderle.

"Companies that get this way eventually run afoul of the government, sometimes catastrophically. They haven't been competing fairly for some time."

Google is facing problems both at home and abroad

Google's problems are not limited to Washington, as it is facing a battle with the French government over who should pay for news content.

The Californian firm has threatened to exclude French media sites from its search results if Paris adopts a law forcing search engines to pay for content.

Google wrote to several French ministerial offices to say it could not accept such a move and the company would no longer reference French sites.

France's new Socialist government, which is open to helping struggling media companies, warned Google that it should not threaten democratic governments.

But Google said the planned law, which would require it to make payments to media sites for displaying links to their content, would threaten the internet search provider's "very existence".

It said it already redirects four billion clicks per month towards the internet pages of French media.

But media sites have had difficulty benefiting from the Google traffic, as online readers resist paying for access when so much content is free on the internet.

In August, the German government approved draft legislation that would force search engines to pay commissions to German media websites.