Tech giant Google has officially lost its seven-year legal battle with the European Commission. The EU’s highest court has upheld a $2.7 billion (approximately 91.8 billion TL) competition fine imposed on the search giant in 2017 for allegedly favoring its own shopping service over its local rivals.
The end of the road in sight for Google
Competition regulators imposed the fine in 2017 on the grounds that Google unfairly pushed rivals’ rankings to the forefront by favouring its own shopping service in search results.
” Google’s comparison shopping strategy was not simply 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 its competitors’ rankings,” EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said at the time.
Google lost its first appeal in the case in 2021 in a lower court, which sent the appeal to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Luxembourg. The company claimed it was being penalized for its dominance and success in the market.
However, the European Court of Justice judges upheld the lower court’s decision that the company was allowed to have a dominant market position but could not abuse it. “In particular, conduct by businesses in a dominant position that is likely to harm individual businesses and consumers and has the effect of hindering competition is prohibited,” the judges wrote.
Google is also fighting a legal battle in the EU that could force it to sell off parts of its ad tech business, with similar arguments that it favors its own services over those of rivals. Over the past decade, Google has been fined a total of €8.25 billion (around $310 billion) for EU competition violations.
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