Report from Bloomberg
In Brief – Google is facing at least €12 billion in damages claims from dozens of price comparison websites across Europe who allege that the search giant harmed them through years of anticompetitive treatment. The so-called “follow-on” civil suits build on the European Commission’s 2017 “Google Shopping” decision that resulted in a €2.4 billion fine for illegally leveraging its general search dominance to give its Google Shopping service an edge. The lawsuits from shopping site competitors, many small and some now defunct, were delayed for years as Google appealed the Commission’s decision. However, Google’s appeals were rejected last year, meaning that the plaintiffs no longer need to prove that Google was a monopolist that harmed price comparison sites. The lawsuits proceeding in numerous EU member state courts as well as in the UK include some plaintiffs making damages claims that alone exceed the EU’s original fine. Google denies that the civil suits have merit, arguing that they instituted a fair remedy in 2017 that has allowed thousands of price comparison websites to compete since, and legal experts acknowledge that proving that Google was responsible for any company’s decline will be a challenge.
Context – The Google Shopping case was the landmark antitrust effort arguing that Google unfairly preferenced its own specialized “vertical” search services for products and services such as airfares, lodging, local services, and jobs, and penalized vertical search competitors in its dominant general search engine. The fact the case took well over a decade to complete was a major impetus for the EU’s Digital Markets Act regulating dominant digital “gatekeepers”, including Google Search. In the US, antitrust enforcers have generally not pursued the same kind of complaints against Google from vertical search businesses. However, Yelp, a leader in the local services vertical, and one of Google’s longest and most strident critics, has filed a civil antitrust suit in US federal court that likewise tries to build on District Judge Amit Mehta’s recent ruling that Google’s general search service is a monopoly reinforced by anticompetitive business deals.