Ebay chief executive John Donahoe has spoken out over the EU antitrust investigation into Google, agreeing with the search giant’s claim that his company is a strong competitor for it in the online shopping sector.
Donahoe’s comments have been seen as backing for Google over the antitrust investigation launched against it by the European Commission. “Yes ... We are a strong commerce competitor,” Donahoe told the Financial Times. The interview paraphrases further comments from eBay’s chief executive, noting that the barriers between different areas of e-commerce are breaking down.
Part of Google’s argument against the European Commission’s charges that its search engine has given an unfair advantage to its own comparison shopping service, is the claim that eBay and Amazon are strong competitors.
“If you look at shopping ... it’s clear that, a) there’s a ton of competition (including from Amazon and eBay, two of the biggest shopping sites in the world) and, b) Google’s shopping results have not harmed the competition,” wrote Google’s senior vice president of search Amit Singhal earlier in April.
His blog post included charts showing how much less popular the Google Shopping service was than rivals including eBay and Amazon in Germany and France.
While Donahoe’s comments stop short of explicit backing for Google’s stance, they can be seen as supporting its argument about competition in the online shopping market.
However, there remains an argument over whether eBay and Amazon are direct competitors to Google Shopping, given that they are sites for browsing and buying goods, rather than simply comparison services for browsing products then clicking through to other sites to actually buy them.
“As Google is well aware, neither Amazon nor eBay are rivals to Google’s shopping comparison service,” Shivaun Raff of comparison service Foundem tells the FT, which notes that the company was the first to file an antitrust complaint against Google in Europe.
