The Economic Competition Authority (GVH) has closed the investigation it launched in June 2021 regarding the operation of Google’s lyrics card service. The authority investigated whether the California-based company is unlawfully influencing the competition between market participants dealing with the publication of song lyrics by placing its own search engine before the organic search results – i.e. links to related websites – when using its search engine (searching for songs and lyrics). places its lyrics display service.
In the course of its procedure, the GVH examined the visitor data of several foreign and Hungarian lyrics display websites from Google searches, however
did not reveal a causal relationship between the appearance of the lyrics service and the individual format changes and the changes in attendance data.
Moreover, on the competitor’s side, in some cases, increasing sales revenue and an increasing number of visitors could be established. The company operating on the domestic market and reporting objections saw a significant increase in its revenue in the period between 2019 and 2022. Taking these facts into account, the decrease and increase in the number of visitors, as well as the development of the sales revenue of the objecting company, could not be linked to Google’s market behavior and its changes.
2025: how much money is the home office worth to you?
Here are our 2025 forecasts for the IT labor market.
With regard to consumer effects, the GVH revealed that Google’s service only appears in consumer searches specifically for song lyrics, and in all cases is aimed at the exact answer, i.e. displaying the lyrics, thus shortening the consumer’s time spent searching. Furthermore, GVH identified as a trend in the general online search market the emergence of direct response functions provided by general search services (eg the emergence of weather panels, currency converters, unit converters and lyrics services).
In recent years, the Economic Competition Authority has also investigated the services of several large international technology companies. Of these, the proceedings against TikTok and Viber ended with a voluntary commitment in the fall of 2023 and last May, and the HUF 1.2 billion fine imposed on Facebook in 2019 (which was later declared null and void by the Court), as well as the multiple fines imposed by the accommodation agency Booking.com, were also memorable. fined for a total of almost three billion forints.
Source: www.hwsw.hu
