Microsoft reveals role in recent Google, Europe antitrust dispute

Microsoft now seems poised to square off against Google over the search engine giant's allegedly anti-competitive business practices.

Just days after the European Commission announced it would review Google's search engine technology, Microsoft launched its own tirade against the company, stressing Google's behavior in the search market raises "serious anti-trust issues."

Microsoft also revealed the extent to which it played a role in the Commission's decision to launch that investigation in the first place.

In a blog post on Friday, Microsoft Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner said his company had met repeatedly with the Department of Justice and European Commission last year to discuss the state of the search engine market.

While the explicit subject of those meetings was Microsoft's partnership with Yahoo search, which both legal bodies approved last week, Heiner said the topic of Google arose quite regularly during the interviews.

"We told them what we know about how Google is doing business. A lot of that entails explaining the search advertising business, which is complex," he wrote. "Some of that inevitably gets into Google practices that may be harming publishers, advertisers and competition in search and online advertising."

Ultimately, that is perhaps one of Microsoft's strongest statements to date against Google. The tech giant, however, declined to respond to the blog post to reporters this week.

Nevertheless, the latest back and forth between the two tech companies represents an interesting role reversal for Microsoft, long the target of antitrust criticisms -- in Europe and elsewhere.

It was only last month that Microsoft put an end to a two-year long battle with European regulators over its decision to package the Internet Explorer Web browser with its Windows operating system. Now, Microsoft-equipped computers sold in Europe include an application that allows users to select a Web program from a randomized list of third-party providers -- an obvious attempt to appease the European Commission, which first sanctioned Microsoft for the early practice.

Recognizing that dispute, and the many other battles Microsoft has waged against regulators over the years, Heiner last week stressed his company's latest charges against Google should not be read as hypocritical.

"Microsoft would obviously be among the first to say that leading firms should not be punished for their success," he wrote. "Nor should firms be punished just because a particular business practice may harm a rival—competition on the merits can do that, too."

"Our concerns relate only to Google practices that tend to lock in business partners and content (like Google Books) and exclude competitors, thereby undermining competition more broadly,"Heiner said. Ultimately the competition law agencies will have to decide whether or not Google’s practices should be seen as illegal."

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