Court cites anti-competitive nature of Google’s practices
Google’s had to deal with charges of anti-competitive behavior for nearly as long as it’s been in business. And while none of that’s new, over the past few years it’s faced a slew of fresh lawsuits across Asia, Europe, and even America. Back in 2017 Google lost an antitrust case before the European Commission and got hit with a $2.8 billion fine, the largest ever imposed by the EU at that time. While clearly Google would prefer to avoid paying that princely sum, today it lost its first appeal in front of Europe’s second-highest court.
The 2017 judgement by the European Commission found that Google abused its dominant position in the search engine market to unfairly promote its own services. In delivering its ruling on the appeal, the court said Google used its search engine to favor results from Google Shopping over other shopping services, even when its competitors’ results were more relevant.
For the past decade Google has maintained a search-engine market share of 90% and its annual revenues have climbed by billions of dollars every year. With this growing success has come growing scrutiny: Google currently has three major cases pending in the EU. In addition to this inquiry it’s also facing an AdSense-related fine of $1.7 billion dollars and an Android-related fine of $5 billion dollars (the new record-holder for largest). If everything ends up going against it, that means Google is potentially liable for over $9 billion in fines.
The current case can still be appealed to Europe’s highest court, the European Court of Justice. Reuters reports that Google is attempting to settle its Android case with the EU rather than potentially face judgement. Considering that $9 billion is just 5% of its $181 billion annual revenue (which grew over 12% in 2020) it’s probably safe to say that even if Google is made to pay these fines, it will only be a footnote in the accounting sheets.
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