Global internet search monolith Google has been running into trouble in Europe recently.

Three internet firms have filed an antitrust complaint to the European Commission against the company, and a court in Milan, Italy, recently sentenced three current and former Google executives to six months' probation each for breaching privacy laws.

The company is also under investigation in France and Germany for alleged unfair competition.

Many in the media agree these apparently coincidental actions reflect European countries' concern over Google's "hegemonic" behavior.

In the Milan hearing on Feb. 24, a local advocacy group for the rights of Down's syndrome patients presented a video posted on Google's web site in 2006, which showed a student with an autistic condition beaten and humiliated by four people in school.

Google Italy, based in Milan, later deleted the video from its web site. But the group argued that Google failed to monitor videos that contain personal content, responded passively to complaints and acted slowly.

The court found three current and former Google executives guilty of breaching privacy laws and sentenced each of them to six months' probation.

On the same day, the European Commission announced it had received an antitrust complaint against Google filed by three companies. The commission had notified Google earlier this month, asking it to respond to related accusations.

According to revelations made by Julia Holtz, Google's senior competition counsel in Europe, on Google's official web site, the three companies include a British price comparison web site, a French law search site and a German web site purchased by Microsoft.

But she strongly denied Google had ever violated any EU antitrust rule.

Those three companies were quoted by British newspaper the Daily Telegraph as saying that Google used a variety of filters to remove them from internet search results. As a result, they had suffered business losses and faced unfair competition.

In addition, at the end of 2009, the French Publishers' Association, the Author's Guild and several publishers jointly sued Google at a French court, accusing Google's book search service of violating copyrights.

A court in Paris later ruled that Google's unauthorized practice of scanning books was an infringement of copyright and Google should pay a compensation of 300,000 Euros (430,000 U.S. dollars).

French market research firm Comscore's latest survey data showed that, in January this year, European internet users made about 29.6 billion internet searches, 25.3 billion of them through Google.

This puts Google's market share in Europe at 85.5 percent, far ahead of other search engines. Its "hegemony" has increasingly worried European nations.

In recent months, a number of French cultural web sites complained that Google wantonly intercepted their web contents and used them to acquire advertising resources.

The French government said in a recent report it did not rule out the possibility that some of Google's behavior constituted a misuse of its dominant status.

On Feb. 18, French Economy Minister Christine Lagarde asked the French competition agency to study online advertising competition and submit a report to her by this summer.

German newspapers and magazines also accused Google News of taking away their readers by means of unfair competition. German map web sites claimed that Google had destroyed their rural markets, prompting investigations by German agencies.

Talking about Google's near monopoly status during a recent interview with Xinhua, Michel Riguidel, an information security expert at the French National Center for Scientific Research, said Europe had good internet search engines of its own, but people tended to use Google because of its powerful PR campaign.

Like Hollywood movies, internet search engines had subtle effects on the user, the expert said.

He said Europe should adopt appropriate information industry policy to break down Google's monopoly.