Lobby groups representing airlines, hotels and retailers have urged European Union technology regulators to ensure that Google takes their views, and not just big middlemen, into account when making changes to comply with landmark technology rules.
The Airlines for Europe group, which has as members Air France KLM and British Airways owner IAG, the hotel group Hotrec, the European Hotel Forum, EuroCommerce, Ecommerce Europe and Independent Retail Europe had expressed concern about the impact in March. of the new rules.
The EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) imposes a list of do's and don'ts on Google and five other tech giants with the aim of giving users more choice and rivals a better chance to compete, but the groups expressed concern that the adjustments could affect their income.
In a joint letter on May 22 to EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager and EU industry chief Thierry Breton, they said their concerns have increased since then.
“Our industries have serious concerns that the solutions and requirements currently considered for implementing the DMA could further increase discrimination,” they wrote.
“Initial observations indicate that these changes risk severely depleting companies' direct sales revenue by giving more importance to powerful online intermediaries due to the preferential treatment they would receive,” they said.
The Commission, which is now investigating Google for possible DMA violations, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Google, which in a blog post in March said the changes to search results give large brokers and aggregators more traffic and less to hotels, airlines, merchants and restaurants, had no immediate comment.
“We are concerned that the non-compliance investigation concerns only the need to treat third-party services in a fair and non-discriminatory manner, without any recognition of European companies that also offer their services on Google,” the groups said.
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