French authorities reject complain against Microsoft

France’s competition authority has dismissed a complaint from search engine Qwant that accused Microsoft of abusing its market dominance.

Qwant, which uses Microsoft’s Bing platform for search and news results, alleged that Microsoft imposed exclusivity restrictions and favored its own services in search ad results.

The French regulator said Qwant did not provide enough evidence to support its claims, and rejected Qwant’s request for interim measures against Microsoft.

The case highlights Microsoft’s role in supplying search results to smaller European search engines, including Ecosia, DuckDuckGo, and Lilo.

Qwant said earlier it planned to challenge the dismissal in court or with other authorities.

Microsoft said it welcomed the decision.

🔗 Source: Reuters

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

The authority dismissed the case due to evidence gaps

France’s competition authority (Autorité de la concurrence) rejected Qwant’s complaint due to insufficient proof of anti-competitive conduct 1.
Qwant alleged Microsoft imposed exclusivity limits on search results and search advertising (ads shown alongside search results) that constrained Qwant’s work on its own search engine with AI 1.
It also accused Microsoft of favoring its own services in search ad allocation 1.
Regulators emphasized proof over market power. They said Qwant did not provide convincing elements, so the authority refused interim measures 1.

New index and ad options can cut reliance on Bing in Europe

Many European search startups rely on Microsoft’s Bing for results 1. Examples include Qwant and Ecosia. Others include DuckDuckGo and Lilo. This creates single-supplier risk 1.
Independent web indexing APIs such as Brave Search API (Brave maintains an index (database of web pages) of over 30 billion pages with real-time indexing 2) give operators an option beyond Bing’s syndication services (the licensed supply of search results and ads to partners).
Investors reviewing search infrastructure can assess providers of independent crawling (automated discovery of web pages) and indexing 1. They can also look at search ad monetization, which Qwant said it struggled to build as proprietary tech 1.
Structured web search APIs (designed to return machine-readable results) optimized for AI systems exist 3. SERP scraper APIs cover engines beyond Google and Bing 4, which lets European search operators diversify data sources and lessen reliance on Microsoft’s platform 3 4.