BRUSSELS, June 25 (Xinhua) - Representatives from a dozen of European companies have convened on Tuesday to call on European Commission (EC) not to accept Google's proposed concessions in relation to online search and search advertising.

These companies, including Hot-map.com, Streetmap, CEPIC from the picture industry and German newspaper publishers' organization BDZV, formed an informal coalition to reject commitments offered by Internet giant Google in April pressed by the EC's concerns.

Complainants and interest parties in the case who has attended the meeting expected more than what Google had proposed. Based on their feedbacks untill Thursday, the EC, the bloc's antitrust authority, may decide whether or not to accept Google's offer. The EC has started the antitrust investigations on Google from 2010.

The EC said two months ago that "Google may be abusing its dominant position in the markets for web search, online search advertising and online search advertising intermediation in the European Economic Area (EEA)."

The EC claimed that its concerns on Google include "the favorable treatment, within Google's web search results, of links to Google's own specialized web search services as compared to links to competing specialized web search services" and its use of "original content from third party web sites in its own specialized web search services" without being consent.

Furthermore, the commission alleged that its concerns also involved Google's agreements to "oblige third party web sites to obtain all or most of their online search advertisements" and its "contractual restrictions on the transferability of online search advertising campaigns to rival search advertising platforms."

"These practices could harm consumers by reducing choice and stifling innovation in the fields of specialized search services and online search advertising," said the EC in an earlier online statement.

In response, Google has made proposals on April 25 to try to address the commission's competition concerns.

Google offers for a period of five years to "label promoted links to its own specialized search services so that users can distinguish them from natural web search results, clearly separate these promoted links from other web search results by clear graphical features, and display links to three rival specialized search services close to its own services."

Google also proposed to offer all websites the option to opt-out from the use of all their content in Google's specialized search services and offer all specialized search websites that focus on product search or local search the option to mark certain categories of information in such a way that such information is not indexed or used by Google.

Google has also made further commitments on obligations of advertisements and advertising platforms, covering the EEA.

The comment from Google on the European rivals' allegation today was not available yet. Endi

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