L'AGCM will again involve the managers of the principals search engines and browsers (Google, Apple, Italiaonline, Microsoft, Verizon (Yahoo), Mozilla, DuckDuckGo) to counteract unfair commercial practices that leverage the ongoing health emergency.
The decision originates from a network monitoring led by the Antitrust Special Unit of the Guardia di Finanza that has brought out 361 URL corresponding to web pages, banners or hypertext links maliciously introduced into sites related to lawful activities, often of a medical or paramedical nature. These sites point to one sixty "abusive pharmacies" – without the necessary authorization to sell drugs online – which promote and they sell prescription drugs, boasting a curative function against Coronavirus.
The AGCM then sent the list of 361 URLs to the operators of the main search engines and browsers inviting them to remove reported URLs from search results and don't index links containing links to sites identified as abusive pharmacies.
"To a previous invitation forwarded by the Authority to the aforementioned operators to avoid the display in the search results of pages in which the sale of the Kaletra drug is illegally promoted, subject to some precautionary interventions by the Authority, Apple, Google and ItaliaOnLine have responded promptly", declares the authority.
"In the invitation, most recently formulated, the Authority reminded the managers who have so far not responded, that the provider of the information society services, pursuant to art. 17 of Legislative Decree 70/2003, is civilly responsible for the content of these services in the event that it has not acted promptly to remove access to said content, when this is required by an administrative authority with supervisory functions ".