EU antitrust chief still threatens to break up Google: report

(Reuters) – The European Union has “serious suspicions” about internet giant Google’s dominance and is not ruling out breaking it up, the EU’s antitrust chief warned on Sunday, Britain’s Telegraph reported. European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager believes the threat of splitting Google into smaller companies must remain open, the newspaper reported. Google currently faces new EU rules on trading practices with smaller companies that use its services. Late last year, Vestager said more cases against Google were likely in the future, after the European Commission imposed a record 2.4 billion euro ($2.97 billion) fine on the world’s most popular internet search engine and ordered the company to stop favoring its shopping service. The European Commission is in the process of drawing up a new regulation aimed at regulating e-commerce sites, app stores and search engines to be more transparent about how they rank search results and why they delist certain services. The antitrust chief’s office was not immediately available for comment on the Telegraph report. (Reporting by Shalini Nagarajan in Bengaluru; Editing by Paul Simao)