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Ebay lends support to Google in EU antitrust suit

The e-commerce firm's CEO has come out in agreement with the search giant in the landmark European case

27 Apr 2015

Ebay has showed its support for Google in the EU antitrust case currently being brought against the search giant.

The online marketplace's CEO has rejected assertions from Brussels that the company has been squeezed out by the search engine in favour of its own in-house shopping service.

In a statement to the Financial Times, John Donahoe stated that Ebay was "a strong commerce competitor" to Google, strengthening the search company's case that it isn't anti-competitive.

Google has disputed the European Competition Commissioner's claims that its share of the EU web search market which totals over 90 per cent has led to unfair market dominance in this sector.

It has highlighted the vast gulf between unique page views of it and its competitors as proof that this is false. While Google Shopping received 13 million views during February, Amazon and Ebay both enjoyed a total of more than 100 million each, as measured by ComScore.

This has been met with doubt from other comparison-shopping sites, however, such as UK service Foundem. CEO Shivaun Raff said that as Ebay and Amazon are "merchant platforms," they don't truly reflect Google Shopping's business model.

Rather than acting as a vendor in their own right, services like Google Shopping instead collate listings from third-party merchants across the web, collecting a finder's fee in exchange for referrals.

Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Youssef Squali agrees with the scepticism surrounding Google as a primary source in e-commerce. Speaking to the FT, he said that "generally, Amazon remains the first place where people start their commercial queries".