back to article Top EU court crushes Google appeal against $2.65B Shopping antitrust ruling

The European Union's Court of Justice (ECJ) has dismissed Google's appeal of a €2.4 billion ($2.65 billion) 2017 antitrust ruling, finding it had abused its dominance in favor of its own Google Shopping service, diverting traffic that would otherwise have gone to rival comparison services. The 2017 decision at the time was the …

  1. This post has been deleted by its author

  2. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Wow!

    Someone stood up to Google... and the sky hasn't fallen down.

    1. Tom Chiverton 1 Silver badge
      FAIL

      Re: Wow!

      14 years. Google easily pays the fine from it's illegal profits.

      How is this a disincentive ?

      1. DS999 Silver badge

        Re: Wow!

        And why was shopping the only thing they investigated? All the stuff Google does, and they think Google Shopping was the Big Bad? Really??

        This is almost as underwhelming as the horror Microsoft faced when the EU forced them to introduce a version of Windows without IE!

        1. IGotOut Silver badge

          Re: Wow!

          @DS9999

          This is one of many cases.

        2. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

          Re: Wow!

          Agreed why not go after the real problem - aka Search and Ads.

  3. demon driver

    "We made changes back in 2017"

    Oh yeah, cry me a river, Google :-D

    What, I'm supposed to be fined for theft of two crates of beer every Friday for years until somewhere in 2016, when I was caught? Even though I implemented changes to my method of acquiring beer in 2017 and bought it legally after that? How unfair!

    1. I am David Jones Silver badge

      Re: "We made changes back in 2017"

      The changes being that you started stealing beer in a different country?

  4. ICL1900-G3 Silver badge

    Good. That is all.

  5. Rich 2 Silver badge

    A long time coming

    Did the court add 7 years of interest to the bill?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A long time coming

      Possibly. RTÉ are reporting today that Apple are having to pay interest on their tax bill. Google may have the same fate.

      https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2024/0910/1469236-apple-tax-case/

      It's been a busy day for the ECJ.

      1. Phones Sheridan Silver badge

        Re: A long time coming

        IIRC Apple had to pay the fine into escrow. If anything that money should have been earning interest on it's own, and if not, sack whoever opened the bank account!

        Edit, the interest was on the original 13 billion up to 2014, which was paid into escrow, along with the 13 billion when the appeal started. No more interest is due.

    2. Dinanziame Silver badge

      Re: A long time coming

      From what I understand, in order to appeal they first had to fork over the money to a blocked account or something similar.

  6. Tubz Silver badge

    Nice one ECJ, finally found some balls, now about the fine/compensation, it should be bigly bigly big, I assume the cash goes to other companies who will now jump on the claim bandwagon or maybe the EU will split it with all the Eu members including the UK.

    1. Justthefacts Silver badge

      No, the official constitutional answer, according to Treaty, is that all fines levied go into EU “Own Resources”. That is, they go to the EU Commission budget. Specifically, it *doesn’t* get paid either to EU member nations; nor, as they are fines, do they become compensation to any other companies harmed. In fact, you can go to the EU budget, and there’s a line item calling out their target income from ECJ fines and penalties, for each year up to 2027. It’s a big line item, and they are anticipating/requiring strong growth over the next years.

  7. BasicReality

    I'm not a fan of Google, I switched from Android to iPhone and stopped using almost all of Google's services a few years back, but these EU lawsuits really bother me. It would be funny if all the government agencies in Europe who rely on Google services suddenly find their stuff simply not working. American companies really need to disregard these idiot laws from foreign countries.

    1. Simian Surprise

      No one is forcing Google to obey these "idiot laws". They're free to not provide their services to EU residents and the EU won't have a single thing to do about it.

      Is the EU a regulation-happy ultra-bureaucracy which apparently has a line item in its budget to be filled with fine money? Apparently so, but that's not the kind of thing you can fix by just ignoring it...

    2. Alumoi Silver badge

      American companies really need to disregard these idiot laws from foreign countries.

      USian, and proud of it, right?

      How would you like if every non-American company would disregard all those idiot US laws?

    3. Pascal Monett Silver badge
      Thumb Down

      You really to go back to where you belong : Twitter.

      1. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge

        I think he actually needs to go back to school.

    4. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

      Well for one thing, if google left europe, it would leave a google sized hole in search engine results that other companies would only be too happy to fill, after all, europe is a far bigger market than the US.

      Which could lead to an interesting result... that google gets a european based competitor who then goes on to steal most of google's business and google vanishes into bankruptcy....

    5. ecofeco Silver badge

      AYRTSIS?

    6. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      "American companies really need to disregard these idiot laws from foreign countries."

      Well, for one thing, market size (and hence volume of potential profits to be made). You seem to think the USA is something unique. The USA has a population of about 330million, The EU has a population of about 450million. In terms of market size, that makes the EU somewhere the big US corporations WANT to be. And that means following the rules, even if they don't like them.

      Luckily for those of us in the "here be dragons" rest of the world where we have "idiot laws", not all USAinas think like you.

    7. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

      They arent American when they have to pay tax.

      WHo needs Americans like that ?

      Its like having a father who never buys their kids any presents or never takes them out for an ice cream and never pays for anything else.

      If everybody was like Google, where would America be ?

      No roads, no schools, i would say no hospitals... but that woudl be too easy.

  8. Drax

    "These companies need legal certainty in advance, they shouldn't be punished after-the-fact for competing successfully".

    Then this is a step in the right direction - having a legal certainty that anti-competitive behavior will be punished. For most people, competing successfully would not include competing unfairly.

  9. Groo The Wanderer Silver badge

    I do look forward to the collective spanking of the American tech bros in the near future as they shovel the security and privacy nightmare of Generative "AI" (it's just statistics gone mad) down the public's throats.

    1. 0laf Silver badge

      I think the worst case is the more likely. Generative AI is a massive, expensive and complete failure, for which we the public are then expected to pay for either through increase costs or taxes to bail out crashing companies who are too big to fail just like we did with the banks.

  10. nijam Silver badge

    Out of interest, since I've never encountered it (despite using Google from time to time), what is "Google Shopping"?

    1. Dinanziame Silver badge
      Trollface

      Now if only there was some kind of website where you could type a query and get an answer!

    2. doublelayer Silver badge

      You want a product, and it tells you some places where you can buy it. How it picks the places to include, how it ranks them, and whether it even found what you were looking for are not specified. Other services attempted a similar thing, and Google often pushed them down the page, both by putting a shopping block on top whenever you did a search that looked like you were trying to find a way to buy something and by moving them down in the search results that appeared below that.

      In my experience, many of the "where to buy this item" services weren't very useful. They often reported prices from a small number of stores, missing cheaper places to buy it, and if you actually liked the prices they found, you could easily find that it wasn't available anymore or had some extra terms tacked on that made it unusable. Then again, I only tried using them a couple times, so maybe I just got unlucky.

      1. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge

        Don't forget it only seems to ever return results from a handful of large aggregating retailers (Amazon, Etsy, eBay, that sort of thing), and seems to completely exclude real small businesses where the products you are after originate. It's like, on a planet of 8 billion or so people, there are only five shops. Of course, that's exactly the world that tech bros want us to live in.

    3. Xalran

      you have encountered it every time you made a search for an item using google search, usually the first 2 to 5 answers are Google Shopping sponsorized links

  11. ecofeco Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Apple and Google

    I see both getting their comeuppance this week.

    Nice.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like