The company had filed lawsuits against three multi-billion dollar fines imposed by the European Commission.
(Photo: Reuters)
Dusseldorf 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 2.42 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.
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, a new model has been working successfully and generating billions of clicks for more than 800 price comparison and shopping offers.
In the two other legal disputes that are still open, judgments are expected in the coming year at the earliest. Due to illegal practices in the Android mobile devices from Google, the group is said 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.
More: European judges negotiate the power of Google – Apple should listen carefully