Online giant Google is being attacked by a series of lawsuits from European price comparison sites, demanding compensation of at least €12 billion for crowding out search competitors and reducing traffic.
Online giant Google is being attacked by a series of lawsuits from European price comparison sites, demanding compensation of at least €12 billion for crowding out search competitors and reducing traffic.
According to TechSpot , at least 12 civil lawsuits from companies in seven countries followed a 2017 European Commission decision that fined Google $2.72 billion for abusing its dominance in the price comparison services industry.
In 2017, the European Commission found Google guilty of abusing its dominance in the comparison shopping market, imposing a fine of €2.42 billion. At the same time, counterparties were given the right to seek additional damages through national courts. Since then, the number of plaintiffs has been growing, and if the current lawsuits are successful, Google will have to pay several times the fine.
Currently, the largest lawsuits in terms of amounts have been filed by the following companies:
Several other lawsuits are seeking hundreds of millions of dollars. The total amount already disclosed exceeds $13 billion. The plaintiffs claim that Google systematically pushed their sites out of search results, imposing its own price comparison service, and continues to violate competition rules.
Cases are currently being heard in London (Kelkoo, Foundem) and Amsterdam (Compare Group, Moltiply Group SA). Most recently, Italy’s Moltiply filed a lawsuit for $3.3 billion for Trovaprezzi’s losses from 2010 to 2017, and a lawsuit for $1 billion is expected in Amsterdam soon from several other services. In February, Idealo increased its requested damages from $559 million to $3.7 billion.
Google insists it is right and calls these lawsuits baseless, accusing the companies of pursuing quick profits instead of innovation. The court will decide whether this position will hold up.
By the way, the Russians also filed a lawsuit against Google. However, it concerned the disclosure of the losses of Russian military personnel in the war in Ukraine. Currently, the amount of the fine demanded by the Moscow court reaches 91.5 quintillion rubles.
