Google suffered a major regulatory blow on Tuesday, when the EU’s antitrust regulator fined Alphabet’s Google a record 2.42 billion ($2.71 billion) fine for “abusing its dominance in search” and favoring its own comparison-shopping service in search results: a decision with far-reaching implications for both the tech sector and already strained transatlantic relations. The EU further ordered the search giant to apply the same methods to rivals as its own when displaying their services in search results.
Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition commissioner, said Google ‘denied other companies the chance to compete’ and left consumers without ‘genuine choice.”
Google’s strategy for its comparison shopping service wasn’t just about attracting customers by making its product better than those of its rivals. Instead, Google abused its market dominance as a search engine by promoting its own comparison shopping service in its search results, and demoting those of competitors. What Google has done is illegal under EU antitrust rules.
This post was published at Zero Hedge on Jun 27, 2017.
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