Google loses appeal to top EU court, must cough up €2.4B

The European Union’s Court of Justice (ECJ) has dismissed Google’s appeal of a €2.4 billion ($2.65 billion) 2017 antitrust ruling, finding it had abused its dominance in favor of its own Google Shopping service, diverting traffic that would otherwise have gone to rival comparison services.

The 2017 decision at the time was the culmination of a years-long antitrust investigation that began in 2010.

Alphabet already attempted, and failed, to get the 2017 decision overturned on appeal in 2021, when it claimed before the EU General Court that its treatment of searches on Google’s shopping comparison service wasn’t unfair. At the time it argued the consequences of the practice to the rivals were not so dire, pointing to differences in search traffic, which it claimed were not “substantial.” But the General Court wasn’t buying this, stating: “Those arguments take account only of the impact of the display of results from Google’s comparison shopping service, without taking into account the impact of the poor placement of results from competing comparison shopping services in the generic results.”

Google then appealed to Europe’s top court, the ECJ. The final smackdown, in a decision delivered over 14 years after the probe began, dismissed all of Google’s grounds of appeal, saying, among other things, that the search giant had “failed to meet the legal test for a duty to supply access to comparison shopping services.”

Google’s counsel argued that the General Court was wrong to say there was a “causal link between the alleged abuse and likely effects,” but the ECJ dismissed this and all other grounds, stating that Google’s “abuse” was linked to the way it positioned and displayed its own comparison shopping service (as opposed to competing comparison shopping services) in its wildly popular general search engine.

The ruling noted that “this discriminatory conduct” meant rival comparison shopping services were unable “to compensate for that loss of traffic by using other sources of traffic, since increased investment in alternative sources was not an ‘economically viable’ solution.”

A Google spokesperson told The Reg: “We are disappointed with the decision of the Court. This judgment relates to a very specific set of facts. We made changes back in 2017 to comply with the European Commission’s decision. Our approach has worked successfully for more than seven years, generating billions of clicks for more than 800 comparison shopping services.”

Senior Vice President and Head of CCIA Europe, Daniel Friedlaender, commented the case has “significant repercussions … on the wider tech industry, not just big firms.”

He added: “While the concerns raised in the original Infringement Decision from 2017 have been resolved in the meantime with the introduction of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Google’s search service being subject to those rules, the case revolved around a bigger question that remains relevant.

“At the core of today’s judgement is the question how non-gatekeeper tech firms should design their products and services to be compliant with EU competition law. That is, those companies that actually are not in scope of the DMA.

“It is essential that companies in Europe know when competition law will force them to share their technology with their rivals. These companies need legal certainty in advance, they shouldn’t be punished after-the-fact for competing successfully.”

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