Qwant urges France to act on Microsoft over Bing search issues

Post by : Bianca Suleiman

Photo: AFP

Qwant, a French search engine, has asked France’s antitrust regulator to take action against Microsoft. Qwant says that Microsoft’s Bing search engine is causing the quality of Qwant’s search results to go down.

Qwant has been using Microsoft’s Bing technology to help show search results on its platform. Now, Qwant wants the regulator to act quickly against Microsoft while the complaint is being studied.

The French regulator is asking other search engines for their views. It will likely decide by September whether to take any urgent steps or to start a full investigation into Microsoft.

The regulator usually acts fast only if there is clear proof that a company is using its strong market power in a bad way and causing serious harm.

Neither the French regulator nor Qwant gave any comments about this. A Microsoft spokesperson said the complaint is not true and that Microsoft is cooperating with the regulator.

Many smaller European search engines depend on bigger companies like Microsoft for their search and news results. Microsoft is important in this area, but smaller search engines worry that Microsoft might stop providing this service, which would hurt them.

If companies break France’s antitrust rules, they could face big fines — up to 10% of their global annual revenue.