At a glance: What the EU says Google is doing wrong

At a glance: What the EU says Google is doing wrong
European Union's competition chief Margrethe Vestager speaks during a media conference regarding Google at EU headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday, April 15, 2015. The European Union's executive hit Google with an official antitrust complaint on Wednesday that alleges the company abuses its dominance in Internet searches and also opened a probe into its Android mobile system. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

The European Union slapped Google Inc. with antitrust charges Wednesday, saying it is abusing its dominance in Web search to promote its own products

Here are the major allegations:

— The EU says Google is unfairly favoring its own comparison-shopping service in general search results. A person searching for, say, a coffee mug would find Google Shopping results for mugs displayed at the top of the search page, even if a competing price-comparison site had more or better information.

— The EU says part of the reason for competing sites' low rankings is that Google applied different parameters to comparison-shopping services, which can lead to those services having a lower rank in general search pages.

— The EU pointed out that a previous Google shopping site called Froogle did not use a favorable system and performed poorly. The current Google Shopping product, which allegedly uses the favorable system, is experiencing higher growth.

— Also under investigation is Google's smartphone operating system, Android. The EU is looking in whether the company is giving smartphone makers unfair incentives for preinstalling Google's applications, such as the Chrome Web browser and YouTube.

— The EU is also continuing a formal investigation into concerns that Google copies rivals Web content and places undue restrictions on advertisers.

© 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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