Streetmap vows to take battle with Google further

Streetmap was vowing to take its case against Google further on Friday, having lost its High Court action in which it accused the internet giant of abusing its dominance.

The UK-based company was started in 1997 as one of the first online mapping services, it was reported.

It had claimed Google was in breach of the Competition Act 1998, and that the launch of the now-ubiquitous Google Maps in 2007 had led to a "dramatic loss of traffic" to Streetmap's service.

The complaint centred on the large map - termed the "Maps OneBox" - which appears at the top of Google search results when the search returns an address or location.

Streetmap argued that showing Google Maps results in the OneBox, over those of its rivals, was anticompetitive, along with the launch of the Google Maps app for Android smartphones in 2008.

But in the High Court, Mr Justice Roth said the OneBox was "not reasonably likely appreciably to affect competition in the market for online maps".

He said Google's decision to display its own maps in the OneBox was "objectively justified".

"The court made it clear that we're focused on improving the quality of our search results. This decision promotes innovation," a Google spokesman said.

But Streetmap was obviously less than satisfied with the result, with director Kate Sutton promising the company would appeal the judgement on two grounds.

"First, this decision is unfair for small businesses. The hands of small businesses are now tied behind our backs," she exclaimed to The Guardian.

"The decision makes it effectively impossible for a small business to bring a competition law complaint until it is too late, because the information required will simply not be known to them," she said.

Her second point of contention was that Google had gotten away with not complying with its legal obligations.

"It admitted in the trial that it did not do a UK test when it introduced Google Maps. It instead only looked at its effects on the US market," she said.

The case came ahead of upcoming investigations by the European Union's antitrust regulator into Google's dominance of a number of sectors - namely, travel, shopping, and smartphones through the company's Android playform.