May 11, 2012
Google Unveils Both South Korea and Argentina Investigations
Google has already unveiled a couple of international government probes into its commercial practices. So the company’s filing with both the Exchange Commission and U.S. Securities points out that Google has been the subject of probes in both South Korea and Argentina.
The filing also illustrates that the Korea Fair Trade Commission of South Korea along with Comision Nacional de Defensa de la Competencia of Argentina have also got down to scrutinizing Google’s business practices.
According to the latest Google’s comments the Argentinian probe targeted the company’s search and advertising businesses. Last year an Argentinian court made the major search engine censor anti-Semitic search results as well as suggestions.
Furthermore as the Wall Street Journal states that South Korean officials are paying much attention to Google’s handling of mobile data as well as advertising. By the way Google had several glitches with the South Korean government not so long ago. For example, officials scrutinized the company’s offices to back up their investigation in data collection conducted by the Street View service.
Needless to say the recent probes have generated more legal and regulatory issues for the company. Additionally both the US and EU antitrust authorities are concerned with Google’s dominance of the search and certainly advertising businesses.
The US Federal Trade Commission has assigned an outside legal counsel for running its antitrust investigation with the key goal to figure out whether Google actually favors its properties in search engine results or not.
