Troubled Google launches last-ditch effort to avoid $2.6 billion EU fine

 

Google has made a last-ditch effort at Europe's highest court to overturn a 2.42 billion euro ($2.6 billion) EU fine imposed for market abuse related to its shopping service; saying regulators failed to show its practices were anticompetitive.

The company turned to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) after the General Court in 2021 rejected its challenge to the fine imposed by EU chief Margrethe Vestager in 2017.

It was the first of three penalties for anti-competitive practices that have cost Google a total of €8.25 billion over the past decade.

Google's lawyer, Thomas Graf, stated that the European Commission had failed to show that the company's different treatment of rivals was abusive and that the different treatment alone was not anti-competitive.

"Companies do not compete by treating competitors equally with themselves. They compete by treating them differently. The whole point of competition is for a company to differentiate itself from rivals. Not to merge with rivals so that everyone be the same," he said. panel of 15 judges.

"Califying any different treatment, and especially different treatment of first-party and third-party businesses, as abusive would undermine competition. It would harm companies' ability and incentives to compete and innovate," Graf said.

Commission lawyer Fernando Castillo de la Torre rejected Google's arguments, saying the company had used its algorithms to unfairly favor its comparison shopping service, in violation of EU antitrust laws.

"Google had the right to apply algorithms that reduced the visibility of some results that were less relevant to a user's query," he said.

"What Google had no right to do was to use its dominance in general search to expand its position on comparison shopping by promoting its own services' results and embellishing them with attractive features and applying algorithms that are prone to discounting the results of rivals and showing those results without attractive features," he said.

The general advocate of the ECJ, Juliane Kokott, said that she would give her opinion on January 11.

That case and two others involving the Android mobile operating system and the AdSense advertising service pale in comparison to the ongoing EU antitrust case into Google's lucrative digital advertising business, where regulators in June threatened to break up the company.