Just Under Deadline, Google Responds to European Antitrust Concerns

Google hit the European Commission’s deadline of January 31 to provide a substantive response to antitrust concerns. The company submitted a proposal regarding what it is willing to settle, said sources, after negotiations in Brussels went to the wire. The big question is whether the EC extracts more concessions from Google than the U.S. According to a source familiar with this week’s active negotiations, the proposal is quite similar to what Google already agreed to in a parallel case with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, over scraping information to include in search results and sharing information through advertising APIs. However, there are likely to be a few key differences.