Europe’s competition regulator is preparing the groundwork to file charges against US search giant Google, in an antitrust investigation over the next few weeks, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday (1 April), citing a person familiar with the matter.
The European Commission is asking companies that filed complaints against Google for permission to publish some of the information they submitted confidentially, the newspaper said, citing several people familiar with the requests.
Antitrust experts stated that the requests were a strong indication that formal antitrust charges were being prepared in the case.
Google was not immediately available to comment.
The Bay Area-based technology company has been engaged in a five-year-old antitrust investigation with the European Union that has stalled multiple times and caused a political uproar.
While European Union lawmakers overwhelmingly backed a motion in November urging anti-trust regulators to break up Google, the US Mission to the European Union had suggested that politicians should not influence the inquiry.
A panel of experts appointed by Google to advise it on how to implement EU’s “right to be forgotten” ruling, had suggested in February that the links be removed only from websites in Europe.
>> Read: Google leans towards EU-only ‘right to be forgotten’
European privacy regulators, however, want Internet search engines such as Google and Microsoft’s Bing to scrub results globally, not just in Europe.