Google has lost a seven-year battle with the European Commission as the EU’s highest court upheld a $2.7 billion antitrust fine against the search giant. Reuters informed. Antitrust regulators first set a penalty Against Google in 2017 for favoring its own shopping service over local competitors.
EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said at the time: “Google’s comparison shopping service strategy was not just about attracting customers by making its product better than its competitors.” “Instead, Google abused its market dominance as a search engine by promoting its own comparison shopping service in search results and demoting those of its competitors.”
Google lost its first appeal to a lower court in 2021 and sent the appeal to the European Union’s Luxembourg Court of Justice (ECJ). The company argued that it was penalized for its dominant position in the market and that the original decision was “contrary to the law by treating quality improvement … as an abuse.”
However, the CJEU judges upheld the lower court’s ruling that the company was allowed to have a dominant position but not to abuse it. “Especially, the activities of enterprises in a dominant position, which essentially hinder competition and thereby harm individual enterprises and consumers, are prohibited,” they noted.
An unnamed Google spokesperson has already responded to the decision, saying the company is “disappointed” by the decision. They added that “this decision relates to a very specific set of facts. We made changes in 2017 to comply with the European Commission’s decision. Our approach has been working successfully for over seven years and has generated billions of clicks for over 800 comparison shopping services. .”
Google is also fighting a legal battle in the EU force to sell parts of the adtech business on similar arguments that it favors its own services over those of competitors. The EU commission initially found that only a “forced unbundling” of some of Google’s services would solve competition concerns, as Google was unlikely to change its behaviour. All told, Google has racked up 8.25 billion euros ($9.12 billion) in EU antitrust fines over the past decade.
