In a key ruling that bolsters the European Union’s efforts to curb the world’s largest tech companies, Google on Wednesday lost an appeal to overturn a landmark antitrust decision by European regulators against the internet giant.
The decision of the Luxembourg-based General Court related to a 2017 decision by the European Commission, the bloc’s executive, to fine Google EUR 2.4 billion (about $2.8 billion) for giving preferential treatment to its own comparison shopping service over competing services.
The fine was the first of three issued against Google by Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission’s chief antitrust enforcer. And as the other cases have also been appealed – and additional European investigations are pending against Amazon, Apple and Facebook – the case has been closely monitored as a signal of the court’s opinion on the European Commission’s aggressive use of the antitrust law. against the American tech giants.
Google can appeal the decision to the highest court of the European Union, the European Court of Justice.
Amid growing support for regulating major technology platforms in the United States and the European Union, courts will play a pivotal role in determining how far governments can go in intervening in the digital economy. In the United States, Google faces a lawsuit from the Department of Justice for anticompetitive behavior, and Facebook faces another lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission.
In Europe, courts have sometimes ruled against regulators. Last year, the General Court ruled against an injunction requiring Apple to pay €13 billion in unpaid taxes. Amazon also successfully appealed another tax refund order.
In its ruling against Google on Wednesday, the court said: “By favoring its own price comparison service on its general results pages through more favorable display and positioning, while degrading the results of competing comparison services on those pages through ranking algorithms, Google will deviated from the competition on the merits.”
Google said it was reviewing the decision, but added that it had already made some changes to its retail product to comply with the 2017 decision.
“Shopping ads have always helped people quickly and easily find the products they are looking for and helped sellers reach potential customers,” the company said in a statement. “Our approach has worked successfully for over three years, generating billions of clicks for over 700 comparison shopping services.”
The €2.4 billion fine was a record at the time, before being exceeded in 2018, when the commission fined Google €4.34 billion for illegally using the Android operating system to prevent the use of its search engine and other devices. services on mobile devices.
In 2019, Ms Vestager’s office fined Google €1.49 billion for imposing unfair terms on companies using the search bar on their websites in Europe.
Google’s investigations have led to stricter new competition rules being drafted in the European Union targeting the world’s largest technology platforms. The bill, the Digital Markets Act, is expected to pass next year and would give European regulators new powers to intervene in the digital economy, including blocking companies like Google and Apple from giving their services preferential treatment over rivals.
Violating the new rules would result in fines of up to 10 percent of a company’s annual turnover.
Google’s competitors welcomed Wednesday’s ruling, but many said the investigations and court hearings had taken so long that Google could have further entrenched its dominant position.
“While we welcome today’s verdict, it does not reverse the significant consumer harm and anticompetitive measures caused by more than a decade of Google’s insidious search manipulation practices,” said Shivaun Raff, the CEO and co-founder of Foundem, a price comparison service. in Europe who helped file the original complaint against Google.
