Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo asked the European Commission to open three additional investigations into Google -- asking the European regulatory authority to look into the search giant's compliance with landmark rules aimed at making the company comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) enacted in 2022.
Under the DMA, Google and six other tech companies are required to make it easier for users to switch to rival services and ban their respective companies from favoring their products on owned platforms, among other obligations.
"Google is using a malicious compliance playbook to undercut the DMA," Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo's senior vice president for public affairs, wrote a blog post. "Google has selectively adhered to certain obligations - often due to pressure from the Commission - while totally disregarding others or making farcical compliance proposals that could never have the desired impact."
He believes the DMA has yet to achieve its full potential, the search market in the EU has seen little movement, and launching a formal investigation is the only way to force Google to comply with the mandate.
In a list of regulatory changes that DuckDuckGo executives feel that Google has not adhered to, they are calling on the EU Commission to launch three non-compliance investigations examining Google's obligations under the EU's DMA.
The obligations include Google's requirement to share anonymized click and query data, a requirement to implement choice screens and enable end users to easily change default search settings, and a requirement to download search or browser apps to have the ability to prompt users to set search defaults easily.
"Google's exclusive default distribution deals mean they see many times more search queries than any competitor can, which gives them what's called a 'scale advantage,'" Bazbaz explained.
The DMA addresses this advantage in Article 6 by mandating Google share anonymized click, query, ranking, and view data. This data would help search engines improve results quality, especially for less frequent queries, Bazbaz wrote.
Google complied with the requirement by implementing the Google European Search Dataset Licensing Program, but DuckDuckGo doesn't think it worked like it should. Instead, Bazbaz wrote, Google is trying to avoid its legal obligation.
Exploiting loopholes and circumvent them is someone DuckDuckGo's Bazbaz warns about in the post. As the world waits to learn the outcome of the two monopoly cases in the U.S., he said the EU must take step to ensure Google cannot continue to put up roadblocks in the way of progress and fair competition.