The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has settled both of its investigations into Internet giant Google and won’t be pressing antitrust claims, the agency announced Thursday.
Those investigations, which took place over the past several years, revolved around Google’s attempts to stop competitors in the mobile device market from using patents it acquired along with Motorola Mobility back in May 2012, as well as a separate issue, Google’s alleged promotion of its own content over competitors in the lists of links on Google’s search results pages.
The FTC’s five commissioners voted to settle both investigations with Google, with the company agreeing to make its standards essential patents available to any other companies who want to use them for fair licensing fees, while separately, on the search issue, Google will stop scraping websites of rival products, such as Google’s alleged scraping of Yelp reviews of local restaurants, and allow businesses to opt-out of its aggregation products without penalties in their search rankings.
“The Commission exhaustively investigated accusations that Google unfairly manipulated search results to harm competitors, a practice that most of us refer to as search bias,” said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz in a press conference Thursday afternoon. “Today the Commission has voted to close this investigation unanimously.”
Read the full settlement here (PDF) on the FTC website.
