Google may have just boosted their public image stateside, what with their decision to release information about NSA’s PRISM surveillance program and their public demand more transparency from the government. But overseas, the internet giant is still in hot water over an antitrust accusation made earlier this year.

The accusation, currently lodged with the European Commission, expresses concern that Google’s practices in Europe are designed to shut out competition. Google  is big in the United States, but it is even more prominent in Europe, where it currently enjoys a 90% stranglehold on the search engine market. As a result, the European Commission has been investigating monopolistic allegations against Google on and off since 2010. Most of the accusations have stated that Google gives its own services preferential treatment on internet search result pages, positioning company staples like Google News and Google Maps at the top of the page and leaving competing specialty sites out in the cold.

Google’s competitors have banded together over the antitrust issue, calling it “self-advertising” and demanding that Google give their sites and services an even amount of consideration in the name of fairer competition.

Unfortunately for Google, the European Commission has seemingly sided with the underdogs. Earlier this year, the Commission gave Google a number of areas where their operations were shifting dangerously close to monopolistic territory and asked the company to make revisions to their search engine result pages to comply with antitrust laws. Thus far, Google’s response–a proposal that offers more clear demarcation between Google-sponsored search results and its more natural findings–has been anything but well received by the company’s competitors.

“It would be better to do nothing than to accept Google’s proposals,” said Thomas Vinje, the owner of FairSearch and one of the major complainants in the case. “The proposals would make things worse rather than better.”

Vinje’s concern is that Google’s proposals wouldn’t actual stop the search engine’s bias, but legalize is and make it more blatantly obvious in one fell swoop. What Google’s competitors want is a more even scale, a version of Google that operates as a 100% impartial judge of search result relevance. For the majority of their search results, Google displays pages with the highest internet traffic at the top of the list. This practice not only means that customers are getting the information that will most likely satisfy their search, but also that websites known for a specific topic or specialty are given credence over less-established sources.

More and more, however, Google seems to be skyrocketing the results of its own services or subsidiaries–of Google News or of YouTube, for example–to the top of each search, in turn pushing other websites out of the limelight or off the first page altogether. Needless to say, Google’s competitors, especially in Europe, have not been pleased with the shift.

The European Commission will likely not offer their ruling on the case for a few months, and when they do, they could still ask Google to revise their proposals once more. For their part, however, Google believes that their latest proposals and the segmented search results they would establish are completely reasonable. After all, shouldn’t a company be allowed to promote their own services, as long as they are providing quality search results as well?

“Our proposals are meaningful and comprehensive, providing additional choice and information while also leaving room for future innovation,” Kent Walker, a Google executive, said on the matter. “We think we did a pretty good job.”