The European Court of Justice, the main court of the European Union, has rejected Google's appeal against a € 2.4 billion sentence imposed in 2017 by the European Commission for unfair competition, confirming that Google will have to pay the full amount of the fine.
The Commission had accused Google of having created and maintained a dominant position in the search sector for online shopping, to the detriment of free competition: specifically, it would have positioned its system for comparing product prices more prominently, without giving sufficient visibility. to other search engines dedicated exclusively to price comparison.
At the time, the fine imposed on Google by the Commission was the largest ever decided for a US company active in the European Union (a few months later Apple was fined 13 billion euros by the European Union for tax evasion). Even today it is one of the heaviest fines imposed by the European Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager, on a large US platform.
In the ruling, the Court of Justice dismissed all of Google's defensive arguments, arguing that its dominant position undoubtedly caused damage from unfair competition. Google will be able to make a further appeal to appeal the sentence, but at the risk of remaining at stake for many more years.
After the ruling, a Google spokesperson said that “today's judgment, which we will examine in detail, refers to a series of very specific facts and already in 2017 we made changes to comply with the decision of the European Commission”.
