The European Commission has been urged to move quickly to protect competition and innovation in the critical market by Thomas Vinje, Brussels-based counsel for FairSearch, which groups 17 high-tech companies, including also Nokia, Expedia and TripAdvisor.
"Failure to act will only embolden Google to repeat its desktop abuses of dominance as consumers increasingly turn to a mobile platform dominated by Google's Android operating system," Vinje said in a statement on Tuesday.
FairSearch said it had filed a complaint with the Commission, charging that the internet giant wanted Android operators to use its leading applications such as Maps or YouTube.
It said Google's Android is the dominant smartphone operating system, accounting for 70 per cent of the market by the end of 2012, while it has 96 per cent of mobile phone search advertising.
The companies grouped in FairSearch also complained about Google in the Commission's 2010 anti-trust probe of the firm which focused on its dominance of the internet search market.
Last week, six European countries, including France and Britain, launched joint action against Google to try to get it to scale back new monitoring powers that watchdogs believe violate EU privacy protection rules.
Google last year rolled out a common user privacy policy for its services that grouped about 60 previous sets of rules into one and allowed the company to track users more closely to develop targeted advertising.
The action came after the European Union's 27 member states warned Google in October not to apply the new policy and gave it four months to make changes or face legal action.
When that deadline expired in February, several European data protection agencies set up a taskforce to pursue co-ordinated action against the US giant.
Google insists its privacy policy respects European law.
theaustralian.com.au 9 April 2013
Google has little or no regards for keeping privacy, but rather the emphasis is on not get caught.
Privacy laws are created to keep corporations and governments safe, where the general public are to be totally transparent, and all about an individual is to be accessed by whoever will pay for the information, no questions asked.
The policy is to gather as much information as possible, which is exactly what is happening at an incremental rate.
Governments and other organisations benefit from this, so it is doubtful that governments genuinely wish to curb this information gathering.
While Google was officially mapping Australia with camera equipment, Google also installed network sniffing equipment into vehicles, to capture and log users data.
Naturally no legal consequences ever occurred.
Governments work together with corporations to the detriment of the masses, something that the general population may have difficult in understanding.
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