Report from Courthouse News
In Brief – A Swedish court has begun hearing arguments in a lawsuit brought by Pricerunner, a shopping comparison site owned by Swedish fintech giant Klarna, against Google. The civil lawsuit is one of many being pursued by European shopping comparison websites who allege that they were directly harmed by the search giant’s anticompetitive treatment. They build on the European Commission’s 2017 “Google Shopping” antitrust 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 “follow-on” civil suits were delayed for years as Google appealed the Commission’s decision, with those appeals finally ending last year. Pricerunner’s suit, filed in 2022, claimed $2 billion in damages, but Klarna says that their damages calculation now exceeds $8 billion. Google argues that the follow-on civil suits do not have merit and that the changes to search results for shopping sites they instituted in 2017 have allowed thousands of price comparison websites to emerge and compete in Europe the the years since.
Context – The Google Shopping case was the landmark antitrust effort arguing that Google used its dominant general search service to preference its own specialized “vertical” search services and penalize vertical search competitors. The fact that the case took over a decade was a major impetus for the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) regulating dominant digital “gatekeepers”. Commission officials are more than a year into a DMA regulatory process trying to balance the interests of vertical search businesses and direct services providers in Google search results. In the US, antitrust enforcers have not actively pursued vertical search complaints, however Yelp, a leading verticals critic of Google, has filed a civil antitrust lawsuit in US federal court that hopes to build on District Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling that Google’s general search is a monopoly. All the while, the loudest complaints about Google search now come from publishers criticizing its AI-enabled search results.