Upset you were penalized by Google? You are not the only one. Tons of sites are penalized by Google each day, on some level. But this time the European Union is opening an antitrust investigation to make sure Google is not penalizing web sites for their own gain.

Over the years, Google has got into business lines that compete with normal webmasters. From web analytics to selling mortgage leads, Google on some level, competes with the sites they rank, unbiasedly, in the search interface that made them so popular.

The Telegraph reports:

Foundem is owned in part by Microsoft and Ciao is owned by them, which is why Greg Sterling suggests that Redmond is the puppet master behind this investigation. Greg does an excellent job taking you through many of the points and angles of such a claim. The Google EU policy blog also comments:

Google comments specifically about Foundem and Ciao as well.

As you can imagine, something like this drives a lot of SEO and webmaster discussion.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.