Bobby Healy, one of Google’s most outspoken critics, shares his opinion on what the European Commission’s fine means for flight search, and argues that a dedicated travel industry council might be needed
Last week Google was slapped with a €2.42 billion fine, its biggest ever from the European Commission. The crime in question: abusing ‘its market dominance as a search engine by giving an illegal advantage to another Google product, its comparison-shopping service’.
So, the big question now is this: Is it liable for a similar fine for its dominance in the travel sector?
The short answer, I believe, is yes, and here is why.
1. Google is using its search dominance to preference its own product ahead of its competitors
Try searching for ‘Flights to Barcelona’ or some other destination, and you’ll find that Google Flight Search is placed ahead of Kayak, Skyscanner, and any other flight search product. It is given more prominence and is, therefore, experiencing disproportionate and unnatural growth at the expense of others. Both Kayak and Skyscanner derive their revenue by providing an air search function that presents the user with an ordered display of flights and prices. They charge airlines to then forward those customers to the direct websites. Now Google is providing essentially the same service [as these metasearches] and is capturing revenue otherwise due to Kayak and Skyscanner in the form of higher cost-per-click costs to airlines. Worse still, the customer hasn’t asked for this!
2. Google is not selling airfares, it’s selling a shopping experience
You could argue that Google is not giving preference to its own product if you consider that the ‘product’ in question is the airfare. But Google is not an airline, so the product is, in fact, the ‘shopping experience’. And that’s what they are illegally surfacing over Kayak, Skyscanner et al. To my mind, this is exactly what the EU decision is referring to. No question!
