Google is threatened with a defeat at the highest European court in the dispute over a billion-dollar fine from the EU competition watchdog.
In her opinion, an advocate general at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) came to the conclusion that Google had exploited its dominant market position to favor its own price comparison service. The billion-dollar fine is therefore legal, it said in a statement on Thursday. A verdict is expected in a few months. The judges often follow the opinion of the advocates general, but not always.
The EU Commission imposed a fine of 2.4 billion euros on Google in 2017. The background was the assessment that the Internet giant preferred the results of its own price comparison service over those of its competitors on the general search results page. According to the information, Google presented the search results for its service at the top and highlighted with images and text. The search results for competing services only appeared below as a blue link.
That’s why, according to the EU Commission, users clicked on the results of Google’s pricing service more often than those of the competition. However, they were dependent on data traffic from Google’s general site in order to continue to be economically successful. Therefore, Google abused its dominant position, the Brussels authority argued in 2017.
Google and its parent company Alphabet initially unsuccessfully sued the EU court against the EU fine. On Thursday, the Advocate General pleaded before the higher-level ECJ to dismiss the lawsuit and confirm the fine. Google exploited its dominant position in the market for general Internet search services to gain a competitive advantage in the market for specific product search services.
The EU Commission’s competition watchdogs have hit Google with several billion-dollar fines in recent years, but these have not caused any major problems for the company. In 2022 alone, Alphabet posted a profit of almost $60 billion – with sales of around $283 billion.
Alphabet shares are temporarily down a marginal 0.05 percent on the NASDAQ at $143.74.
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