Google Travel Feeling Intensified Antitrust Pressure

Google is not only feeling antitrust heat in Europe, where the European Union leveled a $2.7 billion fine against it in June over its shopping business, but now Google is feeling  regulatory pressure in the U.S. over its travel-business practices, as well. A Wall Street Journal Editorial Board opinion piece Wednesday on what it termed the Google-Hotel Travelopy called on Google to compete fairly by giving free rein to smaller online travel agencies to use hotel trademarks in their Google ads and URLs, and to stop biasing search results in favor of Google's own flight and hotel metasearch businesses to the detriment of competitors' businesses. "Google ought to compete on fair terms by opening its auctions to all players and stop favoring its meta-search," the Wall Street Journal editorial concluded. "Otherwise, regulators may soon ask if the search giant is abusing its market power." Google spokesman Alex Krasov said the Wall Street Journal editorial "mischaracterized" some of the ways Google's advertising products work. "The online travel industry is highly competitive and in fact, travel companies are some of the most avid users of Google’s advertising offerings," Krasov said. "Unfortunately, the Wall Street Journal mischaracterized how some of these offerings work. Google auctions are open to all advertisers that comply with our policies; we do not restrict the use of trademarks as keywords, and we do not require proprietary information to run hotel ads. And since protecting users is a top priority for Google, we have detailed policies against deceptive or misleading use of trademarks in ad text and take swift action when we see this type of abuse on our platform." The Wall Street Journal editorial cited a Skift Research article in June about the estimated size of Google's tr