Airlines, hotels, retailers challenge Google EU compliance

Lobbying groups representing airlines, hotels, and retailers have urged European Union tech regulators to consider their views, not just those of large intermediaries when ensuring Google complies with new tech rules. Concerns over Google EU compliance are mounting.

The Airlines for Europe group, which includes Air France KLM and British Airways owner IAG, along with hotel group Hotrec, European Hotel Forum, EuroCommerce, Ecommerce Europe, and Independent Retail Europe, first expressed their concerns in March about the impact of the new rules on their industries.

The EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) aims to give users more choices and allow smaller companies to compete by imposing rules on Google and five other tech giants.

However, these groups worry that the changes required by the DMA could hurt their revenues.

In a joint letter to EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager and EU industry chief Thierry Breton dated May 22, the groups said their worries have increased since March.

“Our industries have serious concerns that the solutions and requirements for implementing the DMA could further increase discrimination,” they wrote. “Initial observations indicate that these changes risk severely reducing direct sales revenues by giving more prominence to powerful online intermediaries due to the preferential treatment they would receive.”

The European Commission, currently investigating Google for possible DMA breaches, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Google, which said in a March blog post that changes to search results would give more traffic to large intermediaries and aggregators and less to hotels, airlines, merchants, and restaurants, had no immediate comment.

“We are concerned that the investigation focuses only on treating third-party services fairly, without considering European businesses that also offer their services on Google,” the groups added.