Google loses EU court battle over €2.4B antitrust fine

The European Union’s top court backed a €2.4 billion EU antitrust fine for Google, a welcome boost for regulators battling Big Tech.

The Court of Justice said Google’s practice of favoring its own shopping search results over rival services “was discriminatory.” The ruling can’t be appealed.

Judges said that EU law forbids behavior that prevents “the maintenance or growth of competition in a market in which the degree of competition is already weakened, precisely because of the presence of one or more undertakings in a dominant position.”

Google was fined in 2017 for how it favored its own shopping search results over rival services. The fine was the first for the company in a slew of EU antitrust investigations, including a probe into advertising technology where the European Commission is weighing a break-up of the company’s businesses.

Google is still fighting two other EU penalties, including a record €4.3 billion antitrust fine for its Google Android operating system.

The General Court backed the EU’s finding against Google’s Shopping platform last year with strong language on Google’s self-preferencing of its services.

Google is “disappointed” with the court ruling, said spokesman Rory O’Donoghue. He said the company made changes in 2017 to comply with the Commission’s decision that have generated “billions of clicks for more than 800 comparison shopping services.”

Rival services have previously complained that the Commission failed to extract meaningful changes from Google.

The Commission has since gained a powerful new tool to crack down on digital giants, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) which forbids tech giants from favoring their own products and services over competitors on their own platforms.

Google this year made further changes to product search to comply with the DMA. It is also under EU investigation for non-compliance with the DMA over self-preferencing on Google Search and its app store.

The case is C-48/22 P Google and Alphabet vs. Commission (Google Shopping).

This article has been updated with comment from Google.