The joint letter supported by 158 signatories including 130 tech companies and 28 industry associations calls upon Executive Vice-President and EU Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager to ensure Google’s compliance with the European Commission’s 2017 Google Search abuse of dominance decision.

European publishers urged the European Commission to take all necessary measures to ensure Google complies with the 2017 decision and to actively pursue investigations into the favouring of a number of Google’s specialised services. Google have yet to comply with the decision since it was introduced three years ago, reducing competition and harming consumer choice.

Ilias Konteas, Executive Director of EMMA and ENPA, said: “Google continues to abuse its unassailable search monopoly to enter new markets with the very same practices that it has employed for more than a decade now. This needs to end now. We strongly support the Commission’s plans to regulate digital gatekeepers more rigorously. However, the quickest, most natural and most effective solution to the fundamental issue of Google’s self-preferencing is a rigorous enforcement of the equal treatment remedy that was already imposed in the competition decision of 2017.”

Angela Mills Wade, EPC Executive Director, said: “The lack of enforcement allows Google to entrench further its unfair advantages from self-preferencing in more and more markets, stifling competition and consumer choice. Every day of this wait-and-see game makes it less likely that the anti-competitive effects of Google’s conduct can ever be undone with untold damage to the many European marketplaces and comparison sites which are demoted by Google’s in favour of their own products.”