Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet (GOOGL.O), submitted a last-ditch appeal to Europe’s top court on Tuesday to reverse a 2.42 billion euro ($2.6 billion) EU antitrust penalties levied for market abuse involving its shopping service, arguing that authorities had not sufficiently demonstrated the practices’ anti-competitive nature.
After the General Court dismissed Google’s appeal of the penalty imposed by EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager in 2017 2021, the company resorted to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).
Over the past ten years, it was the first of three anti-competitive behavior fines that cost Google 8.25 billion euros.
Thomas Graf, a lawyer for Google, claimed that the European Commission had failed to demonstrate that the firm’s treatment of competitors differently was abusive and that such treatment alone was not anti-competitive.
Companies don’t engage in competition by treating rivals fairly. By treating them differently, they compete. The entire purpose of competition is for a business to set itself apart. Not to unite with competitors to homogenize everyone, he warned the 15 judges.
“Qualifying every different treatment as abusive would harm competition, especially when it comes to the differing treatment of first- and third-party enterprises. The ability and incentives of businesses to compete and innovate would be compromised, according to Graf.
Attorney for the Commission Fernando Castillo de la Torre rejected Google’s claims, claiming the corporation had violated EU antitrust regulations by using its algorithms to favor its price comparison shopping service unfairly.
He claimed that “Google was entitled to apply algorithms that reduced the visibility of some results that were less pertinent to a user query.”
“What Google was not entitled to do was to use its dominance in general search in order to extend its position over comparison shopping by promoting results of its own services, embellishing them with attractive features, and apply algorithms that are prone to pushing down the results of rivals and showing those results without attractive features,” he said.
Juliane Kokott, the CJEU’s advocate general, said she would issue her advisory opinion on January 11. Following her proposal, the CJEU will decide in the upcoming months.
The current EU antitrust investigation into Google’s rich digital advertising business, where regulators threatened to split up the corporation in June, dwarfs this case and two others regarding the Android mobile operating system and the AdSense advertising service.
