Google is set to be investigated by Japan’s Fair Trade Commision after it was found that the digital service provider accounts for around 70% of all online searches made in the country, reports revealed.
The probe aims to find out whether Google asks smartphone manufacturers to provide preferential treatment to its search engine over competitors. If the investigation were to find this to be the case, the US tech giant would be in breach of Japan’s Antimonopoly act.
US and EU regulators have carried out similar investigations of Google over antitrust claims.
Over the last decade, Google has received the most amount of fines of all the big tech companies, according to GlobalData, with a large proportion of these penalties relating to its search engines and how it interacts with smartphone users.
During this period, Google has received a total of around US$14 billion in fines, which represents around 5% of what the search engine giant brings in from sales every year (US$282 billion in 2022).
Laura Petrone, a principal analyst at GlobalData, isn’t confident the Japanese investigation will lead to huge changes for the search engine, with such fines often having little effect on the companies receiving them or on the industry they have are found to have monopolised.
“There are unlikely to be major changes in Google’s position in the Japanese market in the short to medium term,” she stated.
Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) will report its third-quarter financial results after the closing bell on Tuesday and it is expected to post strong year-over-year revenue, earnings and margin growth.