Google loses EU court’s latest appeal against €2.4 billion fine in antitrust case over digital shopping

LONDON Google lost its final legal challenge Tuesday to a European Union fine for giving its shopping recommendations an illegal advantage over competitors in search results, ending a long-running antitrust case that involved a hefty fine.

The Court of Justice of the European Union upheld a lower court’s decision, rejecting the company’s appeal against a 2.4 billion euro ($2.7 billion) fine imposed by the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s main antitrust enforcer.

“With today’s judgment, the Court of Justice dismisses the appeal and thus upholds the judgment of the Court of First Instance,” the court said in a press release summarizing its decision.

The Commission fined the Silicon Valley giant in 2017 for unfairly directing visitors to its own Google Shopping service to the detriment of competitors, one of three multibillion-dollar fines the Commission imposed on Google in the past decade as Brussels began to tighten its crackdown on the tech industry.

“We are disappointed with the Court’s decision, which addresses a very specific set of facts,” Google said in a brief statement.

The company said it made changes in 2017 to comply with the commission’s ruling that required it to treat competitors equally. It began holding auctions for shopping search listings that it would bid on alongside other comparison shopping services.

“Our approach has proven successful for over seven years and has generated billions of clicks for over 800 comparison shopping sites,” Google said.

At the same time, the company appealed the decision to the court. However, the General Court of the European Union, the lower chamber of the tribunal, dismissed its appeal in 2021, and the ECJ’s advisor later recommended that the appeal be dismissed.

European consumer organisation BEUC welcomed the court’s decision, saying it showed that EU competition law “still has a huge impact” on digital markets.

“Google harmed millions of European consumers by making competing price comparison sites virtually invisible,” said CEO Agustín Reyna. “Google’s illegal practices prevented consumers from accessing potentially lower prices and useful product information from competing price comparison sites for everything from clothes to washing machines.”

Google is still appealing the two remaining EU antitrust fines, which concerned its Android mobile operating system and its AdSense advertising platform. The company suffered a defeat in the Android case when the General Court of the European Union upheld the €4.125 billion fine imposed by the Commission in a 2022 decision. Its original appeal against the €1.49 billion fine in the AdSense case has not yet been ruled on.

The three cases heralded an increased effort by regulators around the world to crack down on the tech industry. The EU has since launched more investigations into big tech companies and developed a new law to prevent them from dominating online markets, known as the Digital Markets Act.

EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said the retail case was one of the first attempts to regulate digital activities and had inspired similar actions around the world.

“The case was symbolic because it showed that even the most powerful technology companies can be held accountable. No one is above the law,” Vestager told a news conference in Brussels.

Vestager, who is set to step down in October as commissioner overseeing competition after a decade in the job, said the commission will continue to open competition cases even as it enforces the Digital Markets Act. The DCA is a sweeping set of rules that forces Google and other tech giants to give consumers more choice by following a set of dos and don’ts.

Google is currently facing particular pressure from the EU, which is investigating, and authorities in other countries over its lucrative digital advertising business.

In a federal antitrust trial that began Monday, the U.S. Justice Department alleges the company has a monopoly in the “advertising technology” industry.

Meanwhile, British competition watchdogs last week accused Google of abusing its dominant position in the advertising technology market.