BRUSSELS: As the global elite gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2014, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and four other executives from the Internet search giant were meeting in a conference room at the newly opened InterContinental, a golden, egg-shaped structure nestled incongruously in the snowcapped Swiss Alps. They hoped to finalize a settlement with Joaquín Almunia, the European Union’s powerful competition czar and Google’s primary legal adversary for the previous four years.
The mood in the room was cordial but tense. Almunia’s term was up in the fall, and Google didn’t want to have to start over with his replacement. Its previous two proposals had been picked apart by an assortment of 20 Google rivals, which had filed formal complaints to Almunia and the EU alleging that Google used its overwhelming dominance in Web search to divert users to its own services. For example, when someone in a European city searched for the best restaurants, nearby dentists, or airplane flights, Google linked to its own maps and other services instead of displaying links to the best content from elsewhere on the Web.
Now, Schmidt told the group, his company was willing to do both. When consumers queried Google with phrases like “red Sony camera” or “flights to Rome,” he said, calling up a PowerPoint slide to demonstrate the compromise, Google would prominently place a box at the top of its results page that contained links and logos of three rival websites, such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Expedia.
