Swedish startup sues Google for €2.1bn over search results
A Swedish price-comparison company has started legal proceedings against Google for prioritising its own comparison service, despite a 2017 EU ruling that found Google to be anticompetitive.
PriceRunner is suing Google for €2.1bn in what it describes as a fight for survival for European tech firms against the big tech firms of the US.
The Swedish startup has filed its suit in the Patent and Market Court in Stockholm.
It comes in the wake of a €2.4bn fine issued against Google by the European Commission for anticompetitive practices, namely by giving preference to its own shopping service and demoting rivals in search results.
The Commission’s case was started in 2010 and the fine was issued in 2017. However, it was appealed by Google, which argued that the EU’s fine was “wrong on the law, the facts and the economics”.
It was not until November 2021 that the EU General Court rejected the appeal. It stated: “The [court] thus rules that, in reality, Google favours its own comparison shopping service over competing services, rather than a better result over another result.”
PriceRunner’s legal action is based on the belief that, despite the upheld fine and the Commission’s 2017 ruling, Google has not changed its practices.
“They are still abusing the market to a very high extent and haven’t changed basically anything,” said PriceRunner’s chief executive Mikael Lindahl.
The firm, which is currently in the process of being acquired by Swedish fintech Klarna, is seeking €2.1bn to compensate for the loss of revenue in the UK since 2008, and in Denmark and Sweden since 2013.
However, Lindahl is also billing the legal case as a fight between small European tech companies and the colossal big tech firms of the US, such as Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook.
“If US tech giants are allowed to run free and manipulate markets through their near-monopoly positions, we can expect many tech companies in Europe to suffer far beyond the product and price comparison market,” stated Lindahl in written testimony.
“We also see the lawsuit as a fight for consumers, who have suffered great harm from Google’s breach of competition law over the past 14 years and which continues to be ongoing here and now,” he added.
Lindahl also added that the company was prepared to fight the case for many years and had secured extensive external funds to finance a long legal battle.
In response, Google stated that the changes it made to shopping ads back in 2017 “are working successfully”, adding that the reason PriceRunner lost out on revenue was because it chose not to advertise on Google and “may not have seen the same successes that others have”.
Google has been fined more than €8bn by the EU in recent years over various antitrust practices. This includes a €4.34bn penalty for its use of the Android operating system, levied in Brussels in 2018.
