{"id":11126,"date":"2022-02-08T20:32:09","date_gmt":"2022-02-08T20:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/02\/08\/google-sued-for-2-4b-in-eu-after-anti-competition-ruling\/"},"modified":"2022-02-08T20:32:09","modified_gmt":"2022-02-08T20:32:09","slug":"google-sued-for-2-4b-in-eu-after-anti-competition-ruling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/02\/08\/google-sued-for-2-4b-in-eu-after-anti-competition-ruling\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Sued for $2.4B in EU After Anti-Competition Ruling"},"content":{"rendered":"

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(Photo: Greg Bulla\/Unsplash)<\/small><\/center>Price comparison website PriceRunner is suing Google for \u20ac2.1 billion\u2014approximately $2.4 billion USD\u2014on the basis of anti-competitive search result practices. It\u2019s the latest in a series of antitrust lawsuits Google\u2019s had to come to terms with in recent years.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

PriceRunner, a Swedish site that has long offered free-to-use price comparison services to online shoppers, alleges that Google has caused the company to suffer undue financial damages by giving itself the upper hand in search results. Though such damages currently stand at about $2.4 billion, PriceRunner says \u201cthe violation is still ongoing [and] the amount of damages increases every day.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

PriceRunner\u2019s charge shouldn\u2019t be a particularly difficult one to prove in court. The European Commission has previously investigated Google to great extent, at one point running a nearly eight-year probe into the tech giant\u2019s potentially anticompetitive practices. The lengthy <\/span>probe<\/span><\/a> proved worthwhile: in June 2017, the European Commission declared that Google had violated European antitrust laws by prioritizing its own comparison shopping service, Google Shopping, over competing products like PriceRunner\u2019s. Google was required to pay a \u20ac2.4 billion (approximately $2.7 billion) fine.<\/span><\/p>\n

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(Photo: Benjamin Dada\/Unsplash)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Google appealed the decision, but the appeal was denied by the EU Court of Justice\u2019s General Court in November of last year. By that time, Google had <\/span>changed<\/span><\/a> Google Shopping from an ad platform disguised as a product search into an actual free-to-rank shopping tool (the latter of which its customers believed the site to be the whole time).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

With the 2017 ruling having been upheld, PriceRunner believes it\u2014along with \u201cany company that has suffered from Google\u2019s abuse\u201d\u2014has the perfect opportunity to recover losses directly caused by Google Shopping\u2019s domination of the price comparison market. PriceRunner is prepared for a legal back-and-forth that may take several years; in the meantime, the company has secured external funding to cover its litigation costs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe are of course seeking compensation for the damage Google has caused us during many years, but are also seeing this lawsuit as a fight for consumers who have suffered tremendously from Google\u2019s infringement of the competition law for the past fourteen years and still today,\u201d said Mikael Lindahl, CEO of PriceRunner, in the company\u2019s <\/span>statement<\/span><\/a>. \u201cBoth European consumers and digital corporations suffer greater direct damage by these tech giants\u2019 dominance than many would believe.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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