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Google sued for €2.1 billion

by on09 February 2022


Following anti-trust ruling

Search engine outfit Google has been sued by price comparison website PriceRunner for €2.1 billion because of its anti-competitive search result practices.

PriceRunner, is a Swedish site that has long offered free-to-use price comparison services to online shoppers. It claims 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 “the violation is still ongoing, and the damages increases every day,” the company said.

What should worry Google is that PriceRunner’s claim shouldn’t be a particularly difficult one to prove in court. The European Commission has previously investigated Google, at one point running a nearly eight-year probe into the tech giant’s potentially anticompetitive practices. In June 2017, the European Commission declared that Google had violated European antitrust laws by prioritising its own comparison shopping service, Google Shopping, over competing products like PriceRunner’s.

Google was required to pay a €2.4 billion fine and now its “victims” get their day in court.

Google appealed the decision, but the appeal was denied by the EU Court of Justice’s General Court in November of last year. Google had changed 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).

PriceRunner’s lawyers think that “any company that has suffered from Google’s abuse”—has the perfect opportunity to recover losses directly caused by Google Shopping’s 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.

Mikael Lindahl, CEO of PriceRunner, in the company’s statement. “Both European consumers and digital corporations suffer greater direct damage by these tech giants’ dominance than many would believe.”

 

Last modified on 09 February 2022
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