Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Europe’s Next Two Fronts in Its War on Google

The U.S. internet giant is under pressure over both privacy and intellectual property violations.

January 22, 2019 at 12:29 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

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Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg

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Despite its lobbying, Google can’t seem to win in Europe. The French privacy watchdog has blown through the U.S. internet giant’s claim to comply with data-protection legislation, and its threat to pull its news-aggregation service in the region will likely prove far less effective than the company expects.

Google’s troubles with the European Union’s antitrust authorities are well-known: The company was fined 2.4 billion euros ($2.7 billion) in 2017 for abusing its dominance in price-comparison services, and a further 4.3 billion euros the following year for pushing software bundles on Android phone makers. Another antitrust probe, this time involving its AdSense advertising product, is under way.