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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Google Raided in South Korea as Antitrust Concerns Swirl

(CN) - South Korean antitrust officials raided Google's Seoul offices Tuesday, Reuters reported, amid growing concern about the Internet giant's widening reach.

The unidentified source who spoke to Reuters said the alleged raid was carried out by officials from the Korean Fair Trade Commission.

NHN Corp. and Daum Communications Corp., South Korea's top Web portals, had filed an antitrust complaint against Google this past April, saying smartphones installed with Google's operating system Android unfairly set Google as the default search engine.

This week's shakedown echoes a May raid by South Korean police on the same office, on suspicion that Google's AdMob service had illegally collected location data on users.

Last year, the police also launched an investigation into whether Google had illegally stored private information for its street-mapping service. Both probes are ongoing.

Google says it intends to cooperate with the investigation.

As regulators in both the United States and European Union investigate Google on monopoly charges, Google founder Larry Page is being increasingly compared with Bill Gates, whose Windows operating system monopoly was dismantled in the late 1990s.

Last week, a policy group in India cited the U.S. and EU investigations in petitioning the Indian antitrust authority to look into Google's practices there.

Antitrust concerns include allegations of Google choking off competitors in its search results, and vertical integration through acquisition of hardware manufacturer Motorola.

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