Justice Billion-euro fine for Google confirmed by ECJ

Has Google abused its market power and weakened its competitors? The highest European court had to clarify this question and has a clear answer. The next trial is already waiting.

According to a ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ), Google must pay a fine of 2.4 billion euros (approx. 2.25 billion Swiss francs). The tech giant had given its own price comparison service an unlawful advantage and thus abused its dominant market position, the judges in Luxembourg ruled.

The EU Commission imposed a fine of 2.4 billion euros on Google in 2017. The background to this was the assessment that the internet giant favored the results of its own price comparison service over those of its competitors on the page for general search results.

Own results at the top

According to the information provided, Google presented the search results of its own service at the top and highlighted them with images and text. The search results of competing services only appeared further down as a blue link.

According to the EU Commission, this is why users clicked on the results of Google's price service more often than those of its competitors. However, these were dependent on the data traffic from Google's general site in order to continue to be commercially successful. Google had therefore abused its dominant market position, the Brussels authority argued in 2017.

Google and its parent company Alphabet first unsuccessfully appealed against the EU fine before the General Court of the EU and then before the highest European court, the ECJ. The latter has now rejected the appeal and finally ruled in favor of the EU Commission. Google's behavior in this case was discriminatory and did not correspond to competition on the merits.

In recent years, the EU Commission's competition watchdogs have imposed several billion-euro fines on Google, although these did not cause the company any major problems due to its booming online advertising business.

Next judgment to follow

The EU court will rule on a similar case next week. The question is whether Google unlawfully obstructed other providers of search engine advertising in the "AdSense for Search" service and whether the EU Commission's fine of 1.49 billion euros was justified.