The American giant Google lost in a European court a landmark case against the European Union, and now he is facing not only a huge fine, but also a tsunami of new claims. The BBC writes about it.
The European Court of General Jurisdiction, the second in the hierarchy of EU courts, rejected Google’s arguments and upheld the € 2.4 billion fine that the European Commission’s antitrust authority – effectively the EU government – ordered it in 2017 for suppressing competition.
The case linked to Google's comparison shopping services is the first of three landmark competition decisions against the tech giant in Europe. https://t.co/7tn7xDGLsz
— Barron's (@barronsonline) November 10, 2021
The EU didn’t like Google promoting its own shopping aggregator in search results.
The court found that the EU authorities were right, and Google’s business model is contrary to European antitrust laws.
The Americans tried to convince the court of the opposite: that the EU simply misunderstands the realities of the new Internet economy, distorts the facts and misinterprets its own laws.
But the court sided with the EU. And despite the future appeal of Google, he ordered already now to correct the algorithms for which he was fined.
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Google said in response that everything has been fixed a long time ago. However, defeat threatens him with new checks – not only in how he gives out his shopping service in search results, but also other preferences to his own aggregators to the detriment of competitors – from hotel and flight booking services to job advertisements.
In addition, Europe is tightening not only oversight, but also rules. Next year, the EU is going to pass a whole package of laws to regulate Internet business.
Their goal is to put barriers on the way of American high-tech giants to the personal data of Europeans and to dominate the market by ousting competitors from their platforms: from search, operating systems, cards, instant messengers, app stores.
