Five of Google's biggest competitors have signed an open letter calling on the European Union to launch a fresh antitrust investigation into the search engine giant.
The five signatories include Google's domestic rival DuckDuckGo, Germany's Ecosia, French firms Lilo and Qwant, and the Czech search engine Seznam. Microsoft's Bing is not on the list of signatories.
In the letter, seen by Business Insider, signatories call for a "trilateral meeting" between themselves, EU officials, and Google to address what they call the latter's "anticompetitive conduct".
The root of the argument is in the way Google allocates space for rival search engines on its Android "choice screen."
New Android phone owners in Europe are offered an on-screen choice over which search engine they may want to use as the primary search engine app on their phones. This doesn't happen anywhere else, and US users wouldn't see this screen.
That's after the EU slapped Google with a $5 billion fine for anti-competitive behavior in 2018, saying it had abused its dominant Android mobile operating system to cement the popularity of Google apps and services.
Google now holds quarterly, paid auctions for competing search app providers, such as Microsoft's Bing and privacy-focused DuckDuckGo. A maximum of four different search engines, including Google, are offered via the choice screen and different EU markets will see different search engine options.
Tensions mounted last month when DuckDuckGo blasted the auction process as "rigged". The firm won space on Android phones in just four markets — Bulgaria, Croatia, Iceland, and Liechtenstein — down from the 31 EEA territories it secured in an auction six months earlier.
DuckDuckGo claimed it had been priced out of the auction "because we choose not to maximize our profits by exploiting our users", in reference to competitors' data harvesting practices.
Ecosia previously boycotted the auction process before relenting to take part in the most recent Q4 bid. It was awarded a slot in one territory, Slovenia.
In the letter, the five search engines suggest Google has misled Europe's regulators about the choice screen and say they want to thrash out improvements.
The letter states: "We are writing to request a trilateral meeting with your office, ourselves, and Google, with the goal of establishing an effective preference menu."
Christian Kroll, Ecosia's CEO, said in a statement: "Over the last decade, Google has become one of the most monopolistic organizations in human history.
"In no other industry would such dominance be tolerated by antitrust regulators."
He added: "A bilateral meeting between the European Commission, Google and alternative search players is now needed, particularly in regards to the pay-to-play Android auction...
"We want to see EU-wide regulation that ensures that all players, no matter how much financial firepower they have, have equal visibility on all browsers and operating systems. Giving all players access and not just Google, will allow users to opt for whichever search engine they prefer most, which in the long-run will help to create fairer competition in our market."
A Google spokesperson said: "Android provides people with unprecedented choice in deciding which applications they install, use and set as default on their devices. The choice screen for Europe strikes a careful balance between giving users yet more choice and ensuring that we can continue to invest in developing and maintaining the open-source Android platform for the long-term.
"The goal for the choice screen is to give all search providers equal opportunity to bid -- not to give certain rivals special treatment."
