According to the Commission, access to search data has long been a major barrier to entry for competitors. “Google Search has collected a vast amount of user data, which third-party search engines haven’t been able to access,” Thomas Regnier, spokesperson for the Commission, said in a statement. “The Digital Markets Act has as an objective to alleviate this entry barrier.”
Out of control
At the heart of the fight is a particular kind of search data: highly specific, unique queries that can only be collected by a firm that processes billions of requests per day — but which can contain very personal information.
“Once it’s out, it’s out,” said Sergei Vassilvitskii, a New York-based computer scientist at Google, in an interview. “It doesn’t matter what the intentions are — if it’s out to a good party, a bad party. Once it’s out of control, it’s out of control.”
In April, Vassilvitskii’s team told the Commission that it had re-identified users from data that had been anonymized under the method proposed by the EU executive — in a matter of hours.
The exercise was intended to show that, even stripped of obvious identifiers, granular search queries contain enough biographical detail to unmask individuals. However, competitors disputed both the methodology and the conclusions.
“Google’s test was designed to raise alarm bells,” said a person familiar with rival firms’ responses. Third parties complain that the test data itself was never made public for outside scrutiny, a limitation that intensified skepticism about whether Google’s alarm was warranted or, as critics suggested, a strategic response to an unwelcome regulatory obligation.
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