London, Apr 16 (UNI): US tech giant Google is being sued in the UK for $6.6 billion for allegedly abusing its dominant position on the search engine market, news outlets reported on Wednesday.
In a lawsuit filed in the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal, Google is accused of unfairly restricting competition to boost its earnings from online search advertising, using its “near-total dominance” on the market, the CNBC broadcaster reported.
The claim was filed by hundreds of thousands of UK-based companies that have used Google’s search advertising services since 2011, the report said.
The plaintiffs claim that the US tech giant is abusing its position to restrict the work of competing search engines, making its own platform the only place for advertising, CNBC reported. Google also allegedly made deals with smartphone makers to pre-install Google Search and the Chrome browser on Android devices, and paid Apple billions of dollars to make Google the default search engine in the Safari browser, according to the report.
