The two companies, Google France and Google Ireland Ltd, have agreed to
correct their practices denounced as 'deceptive' by the Repression of
Fraud. In exchange, they get away with a fine that could not be more
reasonable.
The new technology giant has taken too many liberties
to establish its own ranking of hotels on its search engine. The
Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control
(DGCCRF) announced on Monday February 15 that it had reached an
agreement with the Paris public prosecutor and Google for the Mountain
View firm to pay a fine said 'transactional' of 1.1 million euros.
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Google borrowed Atout France's 'star' system on its own ranking
This
criminal transaction, which prevents Google from going through long
legal proceedings, is the result of an investigation launched by the
DGCCRF in 2019. This was seized by hoteliers who complained about the
display, on the engine of Google search, a classification of tourist
accommodation deemed misleading, which had prompted the Repression of
Fraud has carried out checks over the past two years.
The DGCCRF
noticed that Google had borrowed from the Atout France classification a
classification established according to its own criteria, which created
confusion, in particular by the use of the term 'stars' to categorize
hotels, with a scale that goes from 1 to 5.
In other words,
Google carried its own classification of hotels by using the star system
associated with the classification established by Atout France, the
only official classification existing in France, on the basis of 7,500
establishments.
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The Repression of Fraud confirms that Google has corrected the disputed practice
The
DGCCRF considered that this practice was 'particularly harmful for
consumers', thus misled about the level of services expected when
booking a room. Hoteliers, too, were recognized to have been victims of
prejudice, since they were presented as lower ranked than in the
official classification of Atout France.
After having transmitted
its conclusions to the Paris Public Prosecutor's Office, the prosecutor
and the DGCCRF thus proposed to Google Ireland Ltd and Google France a
transaction of 1.1 million euros, as well as the correction of the
practice, a double requirement met by the American company. Contacted by
Clubic, Google France confirmed the approach, through a spokesperson:
'We have dealt with the DGCCRF and made the necessary changes to reflect
only the official French classification of hotels on Google Search and
Maps . '
The Repression of Fraud, for its part, was able to
observe that 'the platform now uses the official classification issued
by Atout France when it communicates on the number of stars actually
held by tourist accommodation establishments on the national territory.'
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