Google Makes Final Attempt to Reverse EU’s $2.6 Billion Antitrust Penalty

LUXEMBOURG: Alphabet’s Google on Tuesday made a last-ditch effort at Europe’s highest court to overturn a 2.42 billion euro ($2.6 billion) EU competition court fine for market abuse related to its shopping service, saying regulators could not show its practices had opposing. competitive.

Google turned to the Court of Justice of the European Union after the General Court in 2021 rejected the fine imposed by the head of the EU’s competition authorities, Margrethe Vestager, in 2017.

It was the first of three anti-competitive penalties that have cost Google a total of 8.25 billion euros over the past decade.

Google’s lawyer, Thomas Graf, said that the European Commission has not been able to show that the company’s different treatment of competitors was wrong and that the different treatment alone was not anti-competitive.

“Companies do not compete by treating their competitors equally with themselves. They compete by treating them differently. The purpose of competition is for the company to stand out from its competitors. Not to align with its competitors so that everyone is the same,” he said. A panel of 15 judges.

“Classifying every differential treatment, and especially differential treatment between first and third-party companies, as abuse would undermine competition. It would undermine the ability and incentives of companies to compete and innovate,” Graf said.

Commission lawyer Fernando Castillo de la Torre rejected Google’s claims, saying the company had used its algorithms to unfairly favor its price comparison service in violation of EU competition law.

“Google had the right to use algorithms that reduced the visibility of certain results that were less relevant to the user’s query,” he said.

“Google had no right to use its dominant position in general search to expand its position in comparison shopping by promoting the results of its own services and decorating them with attractive features and applying algorithms that are prone to push results down from competitors and display results without attractive features,” he said.

The EU court will issue its decision in the coming months.

But that case and two others involving the Android mobile operating system and the AdSense ad service pale in comparison to an ongoing EU antitrust case involving Google’s lucrative digital advertising arm, where regulators are threatening to break up the company in June.