Google loses seven-year fight against EU $2.7 billion antitrust fine

Google has lost a seven-year battle with the European Commission as the EU’s highest court upheld a decision to impose a $2.7 billion antitrust fine on the search giant. Reuters Agency reported. Antitrust regulators originally fined Google in 2017 for favoring its own shopping service over local rivals.

“Google’s strategy for its comparison shopping service was not simply to attract customers by making its product better than its competitors’,” EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said at the time. “Instead, Google abused its dominant market position as a search engine by promoting its own comparison shopping service in search results and undermining its competitors.”

Google lost its first appeal in a lower court in 2021, taking its appeal to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Luxembourg. The company argued that it was penalized for its dominant market position and that the initial decision “was unlawful in treating qualitative improvements… as an abuse.”

However, the ECJ judges upheld the lower court’s decision that a company can have a dominant position but cannot abuse it. “In particular, conduct by undertakings in a dominant position that is intended to hinder competition on the merits and is therefore likely to harm individual undertakings and consumers is prohibited,” they noted.

Google is also fighting a legal battle in the EU that could force it to sell parts of its adtech business on similar grounds that it favors its own services over those of its rivals. The European Commission has tentatively concluded that because Google is unlikely to change its behavior, only a “mandatory divestment” of parts of its services would address the competition concerns. In total, Google has collected €8.25 billion ($9.12 billion) in antitrust fines in the EU over the past decade.