The General Court of the EU dismissed on Wednesday the tech company Google’s appeal against a €2.4-billion ($2.7-billion) fine for abusing EU competition law.
Google and its parent company Alphabet introduced a lawsuit in the EU court after the European Commission imposed a penalty of €2.4 billion in 2017 for abusing Google’s dominant position on the market of online searches by favoring its own shopping comparison service over other similar products.
Margrethe Vestager, the European Commissioner for Competition, sanctioned the world’s most popular internet search engine in 2017 for favoring its own price-comparison shopping service to give it an unfair advantage against smaller European rivals.
The shopping case was the first of a trio of decisions that have seen US giant tech companies rack up a total of 8.25 billion euros in EU antitrust fines in the last decade.
Vestager subsequently took on Amazon, Apple, and Facebook, where investigations are still ongoing.
In its ruling, Europe’s second-highest court dismissed Google’s claim, confirmed the European Commission’s reasoning on the breach of EU antitrust regulation, and upheld the amount of penalty.
“By favoring its own comparison shopping service on its general results pages through more favorable display and positioning, while relegating the results from competing for comparison services in those pages by means of ranking algorithms, Google departed from competition on the merits,” the court said.
Maintaining fair competition in the EU’s internal market is one of the few exclusive competencies of the EU. It allows the European Commission to decide on state aid rules and fine companies for breaching EU antitrust law.
The company can appeal against the decision at Europe’s top court, the European Court of Justice.
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