Google faces antitrust cases in Argentina, South Korea
updated 05:00 pm EDT, Fri April 27, 2012
Google subject of new antitrust investigations
Google and its business practices have fallen under the watchful eye of regulators in Argentine and South Korea, Google revealed in a recent SEC filing. The Argentinean Competition Commission and Korea Fair Trade Commission have each opened an investigation into "certain business practices" of the software giant. Argentina is concerned with Google's search and search advertising service and is conducting a preliminary inquiry, with which Google is cooperating.
Argentina started investigating Google in November 2010 to gauge if Google's dominant market position has an adverse effect on competition. At question is whether Google took payments in order to have certain sites appear at the top of the search results, a local paper reported over a year ago.
The South Korean inquiry started last year and Google said it's also cooperating with the regulators in this case. Google's Seoul office was raided by the antitrust regulator's staff to determine if the company blocked competitors in the mobile search market, according to reports from September. These came after complaints from NHN and Daum, the country's top two web search companies.
Google has also been the subject of similar investigations in the US and Europe. [via Bloomberg]
