Three rival search engines have come together to demand that the European Union enforce the terms of the Digital Markets Agreement (DMA) in order to prevent Google from monopolising the market.
DuckDuckGo, Germany's Ecosia, and French peers Qwant and Lilo told the European parliament that despite Google being fined repeatedly for violating antitrust laws, there was no real action on behalf of lawmakers to make the market more accessible for its competitors.
"The DMA should enshrine in law a requirement for a search engine preference menu that would effectively ban Google from acquiring default search access points of the operating systems and the browsers of gatekeepers," the three competitor companies said.The DMA may come into force in 2023 once it gets the green light from EU lawmakers and EU countries.
Google and the European Union have been engaged in a tussle since 2010 with the EU finding Google guilty of promoting its own advertising, products and Chrome search engine at the cost of rivals. Google was recently fined 4.34 billion euro ($5 billion) European Union antitrust fine due to forcing users to use only it's AdSense services The company is currently appealing even as it complies with EU laws. So far Google has spent $8 billion on fines alone.
DuckDuckGo and other search engine makers had previously protested Google's monopoly over the Android Market which led to Google opening up the platform for other search engines. It was alleged that users were only offered the choice of default search engine once while they were pushed to use Google's Chrome engine alone.