When US antitrust authorities gave Google’s search engine a clean bill of health, it naturally appeared a setback for Europe’s own probe of the internet company, which concluded that Google needed to change the way it presented its search results.
Yet to Joaquín Almunia, the EU’s competition chief, there is a bright side. Speaking in an interview with the Financial Times that sheds new light on his two-year long Google investigation, Mr Almunia insists that the Federal Trade Commission decision will be “neither an obstacle [for the European Commission] nor an advantage [for Google]”.
“You can also think, well, this European authority, the commission, has received a gift from the American authorities, given that now every result they will get will be much better than the conclusions of the FTC,” he said with playful confidence.