Google Loses Bid To Nix Huge EU Fine For Illegal Shopping Advantage

A top European Union court on Wednesday rejected Google’s appeal of a 2.4 billion euro ($2.8 billion) fine from regulators who found the tech giant abused its massive online reach by giving its own shopping recommendations an illegal advantage in search results, Kelvin Chan reported for the Associated Press (AP).

Photo Insert: The fine will still stand despite Google's reassurance that it made changes in 2017 to comply with the European Commission’s decision.

The European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s top competition watchdog, punished Google in 2017 for unfairly directing visitors to its own shopping service, Google Shopping, to the detriment of competitors.

The EU’s General Court dismissed Google’s appeal of that antitrust penalty and upheld the fine.

“The General Court thus rules that, in reality, Google favors its own comparison shopping service over competing services, rather than a better result over another result,” the court said.

Google added it made changes in 2017 to comply with the European Commission’s decision. “Our approach has worked successfully for more than three years, generating billions of clicks for more than 700 comparison shopping services,” the firm maintained.

The fine was part of an effort by European regulators to curb the online giant’s clout on the continent. It was followed by two other blockbuster antitrust penalties against Google, totaling 8.25 billion euros ($9.5 billion), which the company also is appealing. The fines are a drop in the bucket for Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., which earned $182 billion in revenue last year.

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