Report from Crowdfund Insider
In Brief – Sweden’s Patent and Market Court has delayed until June 10th its decision in a major antitrust damages case between comparison shopping site PriceRunner, which is owned by Sweden-based fintech company Klarna, and Google, citing the need to finalize extensive documentation. The case builds on a 2017 European Commission ruling that found Google violated competition rules by favoring its own shopping comparison service while disadvantaging competitors. PriceRunner alleges this conduct caused significant losses in traffic, revenue, and market share, and is seeking roughly $8.3 billion in damages, which would be one of Sweden’s largest ever private antitrust claims.
Context – Google’s recent string of losses in major antitrust cases is leading to “follow-on” civil antitrust lawsuits from plaintiffs looking to win damage awards. For example, Klarna’s lawsuit aiming to win damages for harm to PriceRunner is just one of dozens by online comparison-shopping sites in Europe based on the Commission’s Google Shopping antitrust case. Even though Google was found to have unfairly disadvantaged online comparison shopping sites overall, proving that any particular platform would have succeeded in competition with all the others, or against online retail giants like Amazon, is a challenge, although the small European shopping platforms could benefit from suing Google in their local courts. In the US, local search platform Yelp is similarly trying to build on Judge Amit Mehta’s landmark 2024 ruling that Google’s general search service is a monopoly under US antitrust law. They have filed a civil antitrust lawsuit to extend the decision to Google’s treatment of vertical search competitors, which may prove a tough sell because Judge Mehta rejected aspects of the original Google search case linked to claims of vertical search discrimination at the heart of the EU Shopping case. Canada-based Index Exchange, an AdTech firm, has likewise sued Google in US court to win damages based on US District Judge Leonie Brinkema’s April 2025 ruling that Google exercised monopoly power in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets.