Proactive Investors - Google is set to be investigated by Japan’s Fair Trade Commision after it was found that the digital service provider accounts for around 70% of all online searches made in the country, reports revealed.
Aiming to find out whether Google asks mobile users to provide preferential treatment to its search engine over competitors, the investigation, if found to be true, will find the US tech giant in breach of Japan’s Antimonopoly act.
US and EU regulators have launched similar investigations against Google over antitrust claims, with the latter’s research resulting in a €2.7 billion fine for the group for monopolising search markets.
Over the last decade, Google has received the most amount of fines of all the big tech companies, according to GlobalData, with a large proportion of these penalties relating to its search engines and how it interacts with smartphone users.
Receiving around US$14 billion in fines during this period, the total amount represents around 5% of what Google brings in from sales every year (US$282 billion in 2022).
Laura Petrone, a principal analyst at GlobalData, isn’t confident the investigation in Japan will lead to huge changes for the search engine, with the fines often having little effect to the companies receiving them and on the industry in which it has monopolised.
“There are unlikely to be major changes in Google’s position in the Japanese market in the short to medium term,” she stated.
Google’s parent company Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) will report its third quarter financial results after the closing bell on Tuesday and it is expected to post strong year-over-year revenue, earnings and margin growth.