(Telecompaper) A group of 11 European and US online businesses, as well as three German online associations, have written an open letter to European Commission competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia to urge the EC to end its settlement negotiations with Google over search rankings and issue a Statement of Objections instead. The companies who signed the letter are Foundem, Streetmap EU, Twenga, Visual Meta, Hot Maps, Euro-Cities, Expedia and TripAdvisor. They express their increasing concern that "effective and future-proof remedies might not emerge through settlement. They claim that Google systematically promotes its own services and demotes or excludes those of its competitors, and call on the EC to require explicit commitments to end both aspects. The companies believe that Google must be compelled to adhere to the principle of even-handedness, "holding all services, including its own, to exactly the same standards, using exactly the same crawling, indexing, ranking, display and penalty algorithms".