Google has been served a massive lawsuit for favoring its own native shopping service over competitors, in what has been called persistent monopolistic behavior.
It claims it is taking the side of customers who haven’t had access to a fair distribution of price comparison services, resulting in financial damages for both the customers and the competing companies offering these services.
In November of 2021, the European Union’s General Court rejected an appeal by Google and exacted from the giant a record fine of €2.42 billion (USD $2.8 billion) for unfairly pushing its own comparison shopping services ahead of its competitors. This court decision paved the way for PriceRunner’s lawsuit, as Google had already been found guilty in that regard.
“Since the violation is still ongoing the amount of damages increases every day, we expect the final damages amount of the lawsuit to be significantly higher,” wrote PriceRunner. It claims it regularly offers better-value deals than Google, resulting in daily unnecessary extra expenses on the customers’ part.
Google’s antitrust track record hasn’t been looking great over the past months, and we will wait and see what happens between Google and PriceRunner in court. In any case, it hasn’t been the first, and it certainly won’t be the last such lawsuit.
