According to a letter obtained by the Financial Post, Canada’s Competition Bureau is seeking experts in the areas of online search to bolster one of its major investigations.
“Potential experts should have extensive experience in digital and web-enabled marketing, advertising campaigns that employ search engines and publisher sites across multiple devices, and a thorough understanding of the Canadian market,” says the letter the Post obtained.
Based on the content of the rest of the letter, the Post speculates that the investigation the bureau is looking for help with is the one it launched into Google in 2013. In court documents the bureau filed at the time, it said that it believed Google may have been engaged in several acts that were in violation of Canada’s competition laws.
According to David Fewer, the director of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, the Competition Bureau may have been motivated to escalate its investigation into Google after seeing the steps the European Union took in its own anti-trust investigation against the Mountain View-based company.
The bureau calling upon experts likely means that its investigation has entered a new phase, and that it may be preparing to announce how it intends to proceed.
Experts that received the letter are expected to provide an answer by Monday, though we’ll have to likely wait a little while longer until we find out if the Competition Bureau will take Google to court.
[source]Financial Post[/source]
