The European Union have lumped Google with a record $3.5 billion fine for breaking EU antitrust rules surrounding competitive market practices.
The EU’s antitrust chief, Margrethe Vestager, said:
“Google has abused its market dominance in its search engine by promoting its own shopping comparison service in its search results, and demoting its competitors.
“It has denied other companies the chance to compete on their merits and to innovate, and most importantly it has denied European consumers the benefits of competition, genuine choice and innovation.”
The EU’s executive arm, responsible for drawing up and enforcing legislation and enacting policy, the European Commission, have issued a binding order to Google today, declaring that the search engine giant have 90 days to “stop its illegal conduct“.
Google are expected to inform the EU of its plans to begin treating rival price-comparison services equally, within two months.
If Google does not comply with the order, they could be fined up to 5% of daily revenue.
Following a swathe of complaints from small shopping websites, as well as multinationals like News Corp and Microsoft, the EU launched a seven-year probe into Google’s alleged antitrust practices.
They found that Google had been aggressively pushing its own comparison-shopping service since 2008, giving its own products prominent placement in search results. Rival sites would then only appear on the fourth page.
Google’s lawyer Kent Walker responded in a blog post:
“When you shop online, you want to find the products you’re looking for quickly and easily. And advertisers want to promote those same products. That’s why Google shows shopping ads, connecting our users with thousands of advertisers, large and small, in ways that are useful for both.“When you use Google to search for products, we try to give you what you’re looking for. Our ability to do that well isn’t favouring ourselves, or any particular site or seller – it’s the result of hard work and constant innovation, based on user feedback.“We respectfully disagree with the conclusions announced today. We will review the Commission’s decision in detail as we consider an appeal, and we look forward to continuing to make our case.”
The whopping $3.5 billion fine is still small change for the tech giant, whose parent company Alphabet Inc is worth over $1 trillion. Oooft.
Source: Bloomberg.
Photo: Chesnot / Getty.
