Google Plans To Severely Penalize The Chrome Extension Manufacturer IAC For Violation Of Policy

Alphabet’s company Google, said on Sunday that it has removed some browser extensions from the online conglomerate IAC/InterActive Corp for “policy violation” and is under review of "Enforcement options".

A Google spokesperson said, "We continue to communicate with IAC on the Chrome Web Store policy. We have removed some of their extensions because they violated the relevant policies."

The statement also added, "We are reviewing the remaining extensions and our implementation options, and have not yet made a decision on the processing of IAC in the store."

Earlier, the "Wall Street Journal" reported that Google is deciding whether to impose severe penalties on IAC because Google considers IAC's behavior to be "deceptive marketing behavior." The report also said that Google believes that IAC misled users in its browser extensions and plans to ban these products on the Chrome browser.

Google’s spokesperson did not specify what policies IAC violated, nor did they mention the specific options they are considering.

However, an IAC spokesperson accused Google of anti-competitive monopoly behavior. The spokeswoman claimed that Google had abused its position to reduce its browser business to the "last small corner of the Internet" and tried to shut it down. IAC owns the MyWay search engine, a site that uses Google’s ads and results.

The Wall Street Journal cited sources and documents as saying that Google's investigators found that IAC browser extensions often promise to provide features they do not provide and direct users to use additional ads.

Specifically, an audit by Google found that some of IAC's voting advertisements not only failed to bring users to the voting information page, but also installed the Ask.com toolbar and changed the user's default homepage. Even after Google requested it to stop, IAC continued to publish these ads.

Google has yet to take action on its Chrome team’s internal recommendations on IAC, partly because the two companies are competitors in certain areas, and Google executives worry that penalties may be seen as anti-competitive.

An IAC spokesperson said that as part of the agreement between the two companies, Google has been approving extensions to the Chrome store for years. The spokesperson said in a statement: "Google exercises significant control over how we handle these products."