The American corporation Google lost an appeal in Europe in the case of a fine of 2,4 billion euros for violation of antimonopoly legislation. This case sets a precedent and promises serious problems for other technological giants.
The European Commission came to the conclusion that Google abused its dominant position in the market, giving an advantage in search results to its own product Google Shopping to the detriment of other product aggregators.
So, on average, the link to the most popular non-Google product aggregator appeared only on the fourth page of the search.
On November 10, 2021, the Court of General Jurisdiction ruled that Google, by giving an advantage to its own product price comparison service, using special algorithms for this, "essentially left the competition."
The European Commission correctly assessed the negative consequences of Google's policy, the European judges decided.
When filing an appeal, Google insisted that the promotion of its own service at the expense of the services of third-party companies benefited users, but the court did not find evidence of this.
Thus, the court fully supported the decision of the European Commission and upheld the amount of the fine imposed by it.
Despite Google's future appeal to the highest court of the EU — the Court of the European Union — the court of general jurisdiction has already ordered it to correct the algorithms for which it was fined.
This is the first court decision in a series of legal disputes between the European Commission and Google. Since 2017, the EU authorities have imposed several fines on the IT giant, some of which are historic. At the moment, the sum of the three fines is more than eight billion euros.
In particular, the fine for the agreement with the management of the Android operating system, according to which Google automatically became the only search engine for smartphones with this software, imposed on the concern in 2018 amounted to a record 4,34 billion euros.
A few months later, another fine of 1,49 billion euros was added to them for violating competition rules when drawing up advertising contracts. In Brussels, they decided that Google illegally prevented other suppliers from placing ads in the search engines of the AdSense for Search service.
How technology giants handle user and competitor data is the basis of business, and today's decision is therefore a legal precedent and promises them a serious headache in Europe, the most attractive market for them, home to almost half a billion potential customers with incomes well above the average the planet
