Billions’ lawsuit against Google for manipulating shopping search results
Swedish price comparison company PriceRunner is suing Google for a preliminary amount of EUR 2.1 billion (SEK 22 billion) at the Patent and Market Court in Stockholm. PriceRunner says that the search engine has manipulated search results by prioritizing its own shopping recommendations. Swedish fin tech company Klarna recently announced it is buying PriceRunner.
”The lawsuit follows the conclusion of the European General Court which established that Google has breached EU antitrust laws by manipulating search results in favour of their own comparison shopping services. Google has thereby caused harm to European consumers who overpay when shopping online as well as to PriceRunner and other comparison shopping services”, the company says in a press release.
”Since the violation is still ongoing the amount of damages increases every day, we expect the final damages amount of the lawsuit to be significantly higher.”
Mikael Lindahl, CEO of PriceRunner says ”we are of course seeking compensation for the damage Google has caused us during many years, but are also seeing this lawsuit as a fight for consumers who have suffered tremendously from Google’s infringement of the competition law for the past fourteen years and still today”.
”This is also a matter of survival for many European entrepreneurial companies and job opportunities within tech. If American tech giants, through a market position almost equal to a monopoly, are allowed to do exactly as they please and manipulate markets, we can almost certainly count on the fact that many tech companies in Europe will be affected far beyond the comparison shopping market in focus today.”
PriceRunner says it believes that Google has not complied with the Commission’s decision but is still abusing its dominant position.
“The result is that internet traffic, and thereby profits, are diverted from PriceRunner and other comparison shopping services to Google’s own services. The behaviour is also harmful to consumers. Accountancy company Grant Thornton has established that prices for the offers shown in Google’s own comparison shopping service are 12-14% higher than from other services.”
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