Facts
Acting on a complaint by Yelp Inc., the Turkish Competition Board examined whether Google was promoting its own local search and hotel price comparison services on its general search results page in a way that shut out rivals. After a preliminary inquiry, it opened an investigation on 21 February 2019 into Alphabet Inc. and four Google companies, treated as one economic entity. The case centred on the Local Unit, where Google groups local results for queries about places and businesses, and on Google Hotel Ads. In Türkiye, rival local search sites could not appear in the Local Unit. Google argued that it showed the Local Unit only where its ranking system found it more relevant than the generic results.
Question
Did Google, dominant in general search services, abuse that position under Article 6 of Law No. 4054 on the Protection of Competition by giving its own local search and hotel price comparison services a better position and display on the results page and by keeping rival local search sites out of the Local Unit? The Board also had to weigh Google's defence based on its two-step relevance ranking. By Google's own account, generic results and its local results faced different quality problems, and the Panda 4.0 algorithm update was not applied to local results. The question was whether it was reasonable, in that case, to run both kinds of result through the same relevance test.
Decision
By decision 21-20/248-105 of 8 April 2021 the Board unanimously found Google dominant in general search services. By giving its own services a better position and display and by blocking rival local search sites from the Local Unit, Google had distorted competition in the local search and hotel price comparison markets, in breach of Article 6. The Google entities were fined TRY 296,084,899.49, jointly and severally. Google was also ordered, within six months of service of the reasoned decision, to ensure that rival services were not disadvantaged against its own on the results page, and to report to the Authority once a year for five years from its first compliance measure.
Why it matters
The decision shows that what a search engine displays on its results page, and in what order and format, is open to competition-law scrutiny. The Board rejected Google's relevance-ranking defence and required compliance through concrete changes to the design of the results page. Google challenged the decision before the Ankara 3rd Administrative Court (docket 2022/912) but later waived the action under Law No. 7440. The court held that there was no need to rule, and the file is closed.
Related stages
By decision 24-14/285-M of 21 March 2024 the Board accepted Google's new local search designs subject to three months' monitoring. Finding that they had not been applied to hotel queries, it imposed by decision 24-22/499-210 of 9 May 2024 a daily fine of 0.05% of Google's 2023 gross revenue from 15 April 2024. By decision 24-24/562-236 of 4 June 2024 it accepted that Google had completed compliance on 21 May 2024 and fined it for those 37 days, an amount the Authority announced as about TRY 482 million. On 10 July 2025 the Authority announced that, while compliance was still under way, Google had introduced new designs called 'Business Ads' with the same features and function as the local search designs at issue, and that it had been fined about TRY 355.1 million in total, at a daily rate of 0.05% of its 2024 gross revenue, for the period those designs were in use. The 2024 decision on Google's ad tech services is covered in a separate entry.