Alphabet owned Google’s dominance sparks South African antitrust crackdown

Google’s dominance in online search has triggered a regulatory crackdown by South Africa’s antitrust body.

The watchdog determined that Alphabet Inc.-owned Google’s search dominance “distorts platform competition” in favor of large market players. It recommended several remedies focused on improving visibility for smaller South African companies in search results to address this.

“Google has an influence on platform competition because it is where most online journeys start,” said Competition Commission Chairman James Hodge in a media briefing on Monday. “Google does give prominence to paid results, which means that the largest platforms with the biggest marketing budgets can dominate the Google search page.”