A sign is pictured outside a Google office near the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, United States, May 8, 2019. Portal/Paresh Dave/File Photo Acquire License Rights
LUXEMBOURG, Sept 19 (Portal) – Alphabet’s (gogetL.o) Google made a last-ditch attempt to overturn a 2.42 billion euro ($2.6 billion) EU antitrust fine in Europe’s highest court on Tuesday , which was imposed for market abuse in connection with its shopping service. She said regulators could not prove their practices were anti-competitive.
Google turned to the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) after the court in 2021 rejected its challenge to the fine imposed by EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager in 2017.
It was the first of three penalties for anti-competitive practices that have cost Google a total of €8.25 billion over the last decade.
Google lawyer Thomas Graf said the European Commission failed to show that the company’s different treatment of competitors was abusive and that the different treatment alone was not anti-competitive.
“Companies do not compete by treating competitors the same as themselves. They compete by treating them differently. The purpose of competition is for a company to stand out from its competitors. It’s not about allying with competitors so that everyone is equal,” he told the 15-member jury.
“To classify any different treatment, in particular the different treatment of first-party and third-party companies, as abusive would undermine competition. “It would undermine companies’ ability and incentives to compete and innovate,” Graf said.
Commission lawyer Fernando Castillo de la Torre rejected Google’s arguments, saying the company had used its algorithms to unfairly favor its price comparison service, in breach of EU antitrust law.
“Google had the right to apply algorithms that reduced the visibility of certain results that were less relevant to a user query,” he said.
“What Google was not allowed to do was use its dominance in general search to expand its position over price comparisons by promoting the results of its own services, embellishing them with attractive features and using algorithms that tend to follow the results “to push down on competitors and present those results without attractive features,” he said.
ECJ Advocate General Juliane Kokott said she would issue her non-binding opinion on January 11. The ECJ will decide in the coming months based on their recommendation.
However, this and two other cases involving the Android mobile operating system and the AdSense advertising service are in contrast to the ongoing EU antitrust case against Google’s lucrative digital advertising business, in which regulators threatened to break up the company in June , pale.
The case is C-48/22 P Google and Alphabet v Commission (Google Shopping)
($1 = 0.9353 euros)
Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by David Evans
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