Accepting the proposed commitments, the Italian Competition Authority has closed yesterday the investigation into alleged abuse of a dominant position against Alphabet Inc., Google LLC, Google Ireland Limited, and Google Italy S.r.l (Google). The Alphabet/Google group has a dominant position in several markets, allowing it to collect large amounts of data through the services it offers (Gmail, Google Maps, Android). It earned $282.8 billion in revenue in 2022. Overall, the Authority found Google's proposed commitments to be adequate for addressing competition concerns. In fact, the group presented a package of three commitments, two of which envision complementary Takeout - the service that Google provides to end users to backup their data - solutions to facilitate data export to third-party operators. The third commitment provides the opportunity to begin testing, prior to the official release, a new solution - currently in development - that will enable the direct portability of data from service to service, for third-party operators authorized by an end user who requests it, in relation to the data provided by the user or generated by his activity on the Google search engine and the YouTube platform. According to the Authority, which is chaired by Roberto Rustichelli, Google's commitments guarantee a significant automation of the procedure available for data export (Takeout).
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