Antitrust incoming? Google hit by EU complaint, FCC filing

Shopping comparison site Foundem this week fired the opening shots in the coming Google antitrust battle, with a complaint to the European Commission and a filing with the US Federal Communications Commission accusing Google of posing "an immediate threat to competition and innovation." The US filing is in response to the FCC's net neutrality enquiry, and seeks to have search neutrality included in FCC rule-making.

German shopping site Ciao, which has been owned by Microsoft since 2008, and French legal search service ejustice.fr have also filed complaints with Europe. The data in the filing has also been passed to the Commission, Foundem co-founder Shivaun Raff told

Google responded to the European complaints with a blog post pointing fingers at Microsoft, noting Foundem's membership of ICOMP (a Brussels lobbying body with Microsoft backing), and claiming that "after Microsoft acquired Ciao! in 2008 (renaming it Ciao! from Bing) we started receiving complaints about our standard terms and conditions. They initially took their case to the German competition authority, but it now has been transferred to Brussels."

Mochila Offers Partners NetSeer Ad Tech

-By Mike Shields

Content syndicator Mochila has entered into a partnership with contextual advertising firm NetSeer in an effort to bolster the relevancy and effectiveness of its ad offerings.

Mochila distributes content packages from publishers such as Investor’s Business Daily to local Web sites, aggregators and portals. Typically, those content packages are bundled with ad inventory, which the content partners sell to advertisers, splitting the revenue with Mochila.

Now those distribution partners will be able to sell ads employing NetSeer’s “concept-based” ad technology. Unlike other contextual targeting ad products such as Google AdSense, which identify keywords on a given page of content and then serve ads based on them,