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Google Antitrust Inquiries Spread Over Globe, With India the Latest Problem

Conor Dougherty and

SAN FRANCISCO — Google is quickly becoming the company government regulators around the world love to investigate.

The Silicon Valley giant’s latest problems come from India. Last week, after a three-year investigation, India’s antitrust authority, echoing similar complaints in Europe, sent Google a report outlining its concerns about search dominance and anticompetitive behavior.

The report from the investigative arm of the Competition Commission of India, citing the company’s size and financial heft, argued that Google was abusing its dominant position in search and online advertising by ranking its own services ahead of those of competitors, according to people familiar with the report, which has not been made public.

The Indian commission adds to growing international scrutiny about how Google operates. The company appears to be facing a kind of regulatory contagion, with accusations in one jurisdiction hopping across borders and emboldening competitors and authorities elsewhere.

In Brazil, the authorities are investigating whether Google favored its own services over others’. In Mexico, a local regulator, also mirroring regulation in Europe, has backed so-called right-to-be-forgotten proposals that allow people to request links about themselves be removed from search results. And privacy watchdogs from Argentina to Hong Kong have questioned the amount of data that Google collects on its users.

The biggest of these threats is in Europe, where the region’s antitrust authority has charged the company with abusing its dominance in search to benefit some of its own services and is also investigating other potential violations connected to Google’s Android mobile phone software.

The European Commission’s decisions are likely to influence regulators in other regions.

“It’s a little hard to imagine others will take decisive action until they see what Brussels does,” said William E. Kovacic, a professor of law at George Washington University and former chairman of the United States Federal Trade Commission. “In many ways they take their cue from what the older and more experienced agencies do.”

Indeed, other international watchdogs, while not explicitly following the European lead, are raising similar questions about Google’s search dominance, how it uses people’s digital data and what privacy rules should apply to its operations worldwide.

In two decades, Google has grown from a tiny start-up to one of the world’s largest companies. But the price for that scale and influence is an expanding list of regulatory woes that could lead to billions of dollars in fines and demands for it to change its business practices to accommodate local laws.

While the search giant calls the West Coast home, the majority of its users are now outside the United States, which has left the company open to regulatory scrutiny that often goes beyond what American officials have called for.

“It’s a consequence of their stature, and I think in many agencies you have, country by country, a large number of affected firms going to the competition agency saying, ‘You have to do something,’ ” Mr. Kovacic said.

India, in particular, has become a crucial market for American Internet companies like Google and Facebook, which are largely shut out of China. Google’s incoming chief executive, Sundar Pichai, was born in India, and the company has made a big push in the country through programs like Android One, an attempt to make a smartphone for less than $50.

But regulatory scrutiny could challenge those plans.

While not explicitly related to Google’s continuing antitrust problems in Europe, India’s accusations, based on a complaint by the matchmaking website Bharat Matrimony and the watchdog group Consumer Unity & Trust Society, are similar.

India’s competition commission will next receive input from both Google and the complainants in what is likely to be a series of hearings, after which it can reject the report, ask for a further investigation or accept it in whole or in part.

Google has until Sept. 10 to respond to the commission, but it could ask for more time. The company is likely to argue that, as of yet, no jurisdiction has found its search results to be anticompetitive, and that there is no legal basis for Google’s competitors to dictate what it puts in its search results.

In India, Google competes with several search services, like Bing from Microsoft, and product search services, like Flipkart and Amazon, as well as local search services, like Justdial.

“We’re currently reviewing this report from the C.C.I.’s ongoing investigation,” a Google spokeswoman said in an email statement. “We continue to work closely with the C.C.I. and remain confident that we comply fully with India’s competition laws.”

As part of a planned trip to the United States, Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, is expected to visit Google’s Mountain View campus at the end of the month.

In Brazil, the local competition authority opened an investigation two years ago into whether Google used its advertising platform to favor its own services over those of rivals.

Mirroring language used by European antitrust regulators, Brazilian officials said they were reviewing complaints about Google’s shopping service, which rivals say was given greater prominence in search results over competing price-comparison products. The case was based on complaints from Microsoft and Brazilian rivals like Buscapé and Bondfaro, according to regulatory documents.

South Korean competition authorities also raided Google’s local offices in their own two-year antitrust investigation related to the company’s Android mobile software, but they eventually dropped the case in 2013 after finding no wrongdoing.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Google Antitrust Inquiries Spread Over Globe, With India the Latest Problem. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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