Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has urged the European Union to widen its Digital Markets Act (DMA) investigation into Google, claiming the search giant is in breach of several areas where the bloc has yet to formally probe the company’s compliance.
The EU’s flagship market contestability rulebook has been in force on a handful of tech giants since March, including Google. Fines for failing to abide by DMA rules that mandate things like platform access on FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) terms can reach up to 10% of global annual turnover on paper. So it’s not a regulation Big Tech can just ignore.
However we’ve yet to see any sanctions land, despite months of competitors accusing major platforms of flouting the law — or, at best, engaging in so-called “malicious compliance”.
In a blog post published Wednesday, DuckDuckGo Senior Vice President for Public Affairs Kamyl Bazbaz set out several fresh charges, starting with accusing Google of a self-serving narrow interpretation of a DMA requirement to avoid sharing “click-and-query” data that could help competitors.
The “Google European Search Dataset Licensing Program“, which was the company’s response to the legal requirement to share click-and-query data, yields a data-set that DuckDuckGo says “has little to no utility to competing search engines” — largely, it argues, as a result of Google’s choice of anonymization method, which means only data from queries that have been searched more than 30 times in the last 13 months by 30 separate signed in users are included.
“This method is conveniently overbroad,” DuckDuckGo wrote, suggesting that Google’s dataset “would omit a staggering ~99% of search queries including ‘longtail’ queries that are the most valuable to competitors.”
“Google is trying to avoid its legal obligation in the name of privacy, which is ironic coming from the Internet’s biggest tracker,” its blog post added.
The Commission has set out a number of complaints against DMA gatekeepers and is working through non-compliance proceedings, including an investigation into Google’s self preferencing, which kicked off in late March. But the EU’s DMA probe of the search giant hasn’t led to further public pronouncements, unlike in other Commission proceedings against Apple and Meta, where this summer the EU reached preliminary breach findings.
Resource limitations may be one reason why the EU isn’t moving as quickly as some had hoped. The DMA is an ex ante competition reform that some had even anticipated could be self-executing (i.e. dispensing with the need for regulatory enforcement), since it applies a set of up-front rules on in-scope tech giants.
However while this year has seen a raft of changes made by platforms, which they claim as DMA compliance, many of their competitors remain unimpressed, accusing Big Tech of theatrics to try to avoid actually complying with the spirit of the law and piling pressure on the Commission to intervene.
The EU, meanwhile, has limited resources to conduct this centralized enforcement. And avoiding spreading its staffers too thin may be one of the reasons why we haven’t seen more-formal proceedings opened.
Choice screens not easing switching
DuckDuckGo’s blog post lists two further complaints against Google that it’s urging the Commission to investigate related to choice screens the regulation has forced the tech giant to implement in the EU in relation to its eponymous search engine and Chrome browser.
The DMA requires that Google lets users easily switch from its own search and browser products to rivals’ products as defaults. And the company has implemented choice screens in the EU as its response to this obligation. However, DuckDuckGo argues it has not delivered on what the regulation requires as it says it’s still too arduous for users to switch.
“Before the DMA came into effect, it took more than 15 steps to switch your default search engine on Android, and today that is still the case,” Bazbaz wrote.
DuckDuckGo says the same is true for Chrome. “Google has completely ignored its easy switching obligations under the DMA,” he argued. “As a result, we believe the Commission must launch a non-compliance investigation to get Google to fulfill its requirements under the law. ‘Easy switching’ should mean competition is actually one click away.”
Discussing the impact of the Google search choice screen on DuckDuckGo’s regional market share, Bazbaz told TechCrunch it is “definitely” seeing an increase in downloads on Android devices as a result of an improved design following the DMA coming into force. But since it has not yet been rolled out to all Google default users on Android, he said the impact on DuckDuckGo’s total install base remains “marginal.”
“So few users actually see it, and it’s not a permeant setting that facilities easy switching,” he explained, adding: “Compare that to the search engine choice screen rolled out on Chrome to their entire EEA [European Economic Area] user-base and we saw a 75% increase in search queries coming through Chrome.”
The Commission has actually forced choice screens on Android since long before the DMA via classical competition enforcement against Google’s mobile platform dating back to 2018.
In that case, it took years of competitor complaints, and, finally, direct pressure from the EU, before Google ditched a pay-to-play auction for filling slots on the choice screen that rivals had warned fatally undermined the mechanism. Hence Google’s regional marketshare for search remained much the same.
The upshot is the Commission should be wise to Google tactics aimed at undermining the impact of competition remedies. But DuckDuckGo’s point is EU enforcers risk looking asleep at the wheel again. Yet the DMA was supposed to avoid this kind of unwelcome deja vu.
“We have raised these issues with the Commission before privately and they indicated they are taking them seriously and looking into them,” Bazbaz also told TechCrunch. “That said, we believe launching formal investigations is likely the only way to force Google into compliance.”
“To comply with both the letter and the spirit of the DMA, we have consulted extensively with industry, experts, and the European Commission and made significant changes to our products,” said Emily Clarke, a Google spokesperson. “This includes providing consumers and businesses with even more choices about what services they use. When consumers use our services, they expect their data to be protected. We will not compromise that trust in order to give competitors more access to sensitive data.”
Commission spokeswoman Lea Zuber said the EU would not comment on specific complaints but added general remarks, saying it is “fully committed to ensuring the implementation and enforcement of the DMA.”