Court of the EU confirms billions in fine

Düsseldorf, Brussels Google’s lawsuit was unsuccessful: the EU court upheld a competition fine from the EU Commission amounting to 2.42 billion euros. The judges in Luxembourg announced on Wednesday. However, the judgment can still be appealed to the European Court of Justice.

The dispute over antitrust violations with the EU Commission has been a constant topic for Google for years. Between 2017 and 2019, the commission responsible for competition imposed fines totaling more than eight billion euros. Google considers all of these decisions to be wrong and is fighting against them with lawsuits.

In the shopping case decided on Wednesday, the Commission imposed a fine of 2.4 billion euros in June 2017 because Google had abused its dominant position as a search engine operator. It concluded that the company had given its own price comparison service, Google Shopping, an improper advantage. Put simply, the Google service is therefore much easier for users of the Google search engine to find than pages from other operators on which products and offers can be compared. Google has thus withdrawn from the competition, it says in the judgment.

While Google is still fighting against the fine and other requirements, the companies concerned are pushing for the decision to be implemented. A year ago, 135 companies and 30 industrial associations asked the EU Commission in a letter “to enforce their Google abuse decision from 2017”. In it, German entrepreneurs such as Johannes Reck from the travel platform GetyourGuide, Trivago CEO Axel Hefer and Stepstone boss Sebastian Dettmers accused the US group of “continuing to favor its own services in general search results pages” and demanded that this practice “finally come to an end will”.

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Nothing has improved since then, it is said from the circle of the letter sender. On the contrary: Google has sometimes exerted a lot of pressure and terminated partnerships. At Google, the criticism is met with incomprehension, its new model has been generating billions of clicks for more than 800 price comparison and shopping offers for years.

The EU plans to explicitly ban behavior like Google’s. Then there would no longer be a need for complex competition law procedures to check whether a company has abused its market power. The law called the “Digital Markets Act” (DMA) would simply forbid the large Internet companies from preferring their own products on search results pages.

“For the future we need a clear list of prohibited practices so that the Commission can take effective and quick action against Google and Co. if necessary,” said the CSU MEP Markus Ferber. The Green MP Rasmus Andresen sees it similarly: “We can no longer lose ourselves in court proceedings that lasted for years when the exploitation of market power is obvious.”

The main controversial question is which companies should be covered by the law. It is already clear that they include Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. The SPD, the Greens and parts of the Union are pushing for the scope to be expanded and for companies such as Zalando, Delivery Hero, Booking.com and others to be included.

In the two other legal disputes that are still open, judgments are expected in the coming year at the earliest. Because Google had obliged cell phone manufacturers to preinstall several Google apps on Android phones and to offer them prominently, the company is expected to pay 4.34 billion euros. The other case concerns the abuse of dominant positions in the field of online advertising and a fine of almost 1.5 billion euros.

These practices should also be banned in the DMA and could then be stopped without a long process. “With the law on digital markets (DMA) we will now ensure that the EU Commission can intervene in the future before such enormous damage occurs,” said the CDU member Andreas Schwab.

More: European judges negotiate the power of Google – Apple should listen carefully

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