Google’s latest product: Google Politics

After years of playing hardball in Europe, Google is turning on the charm.

From parties at Brussels hot spots to face time with politicians and millions spent on lobbying, the U.S. tech giant is trying to repair soured relationships that could cost the California-based company billions in fines and even threaten its very structure.

“We just didn’t have the people on the ground to be able to have some of those conversations as we grew,” Matt Brittin, Google’s chief executive for Europe, acknowledged in a recent interview.

Google rented part of a national art museum in Brussels for a month this spring. It held a bash to celebrate YouTube’s 10th anniversary, inviting commissioners, MEPs, VIPs and the press. U.K. pop star Ellie Goulding sang some hits. Google also held an exhibition highlighting the work of its Cultural Institute, which helps museums, galleries and other cultural institutions make their works available free online.

In April, Google announced it would give €150 million in funding for newsroom technology to some of Europe’s largest newspapers and journalism organizations, including the Financial Times, Die Zeit and the European Journalism Centre. The company’s Digital News Initiative now has close to 60 participants, with more than 1,000 others clambering to join.

Google is also putting on a full-court press at the European institutions. Brittin plans to travel to Brussels from London at least once a month, and the company shelled out €3.5 million lobbying the European Union last year, a 480 percent increase over 2011, making it one of the EU’s biggest corporate spenders on lobbying.

The reason for the charm offensive is clear: Google has never had to fight so many battles against so many adversaries.

As the company has increased its dominance in search and smartphone software, it has expanded into new arenas, including phone and tablet hardware, wearable gadgets and cars.

But Google may find its gruff tactics from years past have made some doors hard to reopen and opponents slow to forgive or settle old claims. More than a dozen members of Parliament, regulators and tech companies interviewed by POLITICO recalled past meetings with the company’s European arm in which they felt belittled and their opinions brushed aside.

For perspective, Google’s global revenue last year of $66 billion (€58.5 billion) dwarfed the value of all of the goods and services produced in Latvia or Luxembourg. The two countries that will hold the rotating  presidency of the European Council this year.

Google’s Android operating system runs almost 80 percent of the world’s smartphones sold in the first quarter of this year and the company handles more than 90 percent of the Internet searches in Europe.

“Google said, ‘This [European Parliament] means nothing. I do not spend time to go there and give my opinion,’” recalled MEP Ramon Tremosa, a Catalan from the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe. Google’s adversaries, by contrast, “have been very active. They have gone door-by-door, spending hours explaining” their complaints.

App developer Disconnect is the latest to complain. It went to the Commission this month alleging Google abused its market power by removing Disconnect’s privacy app from the Play Store.

“Google is like a white knight for our industry.”

“If you look at the correspondence, we’ve gone through their appeals process. We went down every pathway prior to launching the complaint, and they shut us down and said, ‘We don’t want to talk about this anymore, the decision is permanent,’” said Casey Oppenheim, co-founder and CEO of the California-based company.

In response, Brittin said the app was removed because it didn’t comply with rules that prohibit apps from interfering with each other.

But Oppenheim is just one of the latest in a growing chorus who said Google has been difficult to work with.

Thomas Höppner, who is representing German press publishers (including Axel Springer, a co-owner of POLITICO’s European edition) in their complaint to the Commission, said Google has never made any overture to settle.

“The opposition in Germany reflects the opposition in Europe, covering very diverse industries from travel to publishing,” he said.

To be sure, even some of Google’s critics appreciate the company’s broad generosity for the tech industry in Europe, and others have noticed a slow change in attitude from top executives.

“Google is like a white knight for our industry,” said an executive at a Google competitor. “It’s one of the only companies, one of very few, which is willing to invest serious resources in defending industry’s interests in data protection, net neutrality, etc., any number of policy issues where European industry is extremely disorganized. It’s great to have Google and the other American giants doing the work for the whole sector. We all owe Google a huge debt in the policy area for the work they’ve done.”

And some regulators have noticed slow improvements.

Everyone is readying themselves for a drawn-out battle over antitrust charges.

Spain’s data protection agency AEPD led the fight that ultimately forced Google to delete search results about Europeans that were inadequate or no longer relevant, in what became known as “the right to be forgotten.”

In a parallel dispute, the Spanish agency slapped Google with a €900,000 fine in December 2013, the largest privacy fine to date in Europe over the company’s privacy policies.

José Luis Rodríguez Álvarez, director of AEPD, recalled early meetings with Google in which the company claimed Spain did not have the authority or jurisdiction to supervise it.

“Before, each meeting started with them saying, ‘You do not have competency.’ Now, we discuss substance,” he said. Ever since the May 2014 ruling from the European Court of Justice, he said Google has slowly started to introduce some changes and is taking important steps in the right direction.

Al Verney, Google’s spokesman in Europe, acknowledged the company had needed to make some changes.

“We haven’t always got privacy right in Europe, not just because of errors we’ve made, but our attitude too,” he said. “But last May’s right-to-be-forgotten ruling was a real ‘we get it’ moment for us, as our swift implementation of the ruling shows. We’ve also been working on giving users more clarity about the data we collect and better controls.”

Nevertheless, Google still has a lot of convincing to do.

“We thought they understood that the EU market was different to the U.S. market. But so far there have been many words, but little actions,” Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, president of the French data protection authority, said.

The European commissioner in charge of antitrust, Margrethe Vestager, seems to agree.

In April, the Commission formally accused Google of breaking EU law by promoting Google Shopping within its search results over its competitors. That follows on from almost five years of inquiry and on-off settlement negotiations.

Antitrust fines are capped at 10 percent of global revenues, meaning Google could be fined a maximum of €5.8 billion, although the Commission rarely, if ever, imposes the maximum.

In parallel, Vestager also opened a formal probe into how Google licenses its Android operating system to smartphone makers, following complaints that Google coerces manufacturers to exclusively pre-install its apps. She also made clear the Commission continues to investigate a number of other concerns.

“Smartphones, tablets and similar devices play an increasing role in many people’s daily lives and I want to make sure the markets in this area can flourish without anti-competitive constraints imposed by any company,” Vestager said at the time.

Meanwhile, everyone is readying themselves for a drawn-out battle over the antitrust charges.

“Google has consistently denied its liability. It has denied its dominance, the abuse, the existence of jurisdiction, and that it is under a special obligation not to harm competition more than it has,” said David Wood, a lawyer representing complainant iComp. “The likelihood of them recognizing that they cannot discriminate, changing their behavior and extending the lessons learned to other cases, has to be pretty low.”