The General Court of the European Union upheld an antitrust ruling of $2.8 billion against Google, whose violation of the law involved it leading users to the company’s own comparative shopping ads. In 2017, the European Commission ruled that Google must pay a fine of $2.8 billion because it was described as abusing its market dominance over shopping ads and illegally manipulating search.
We think the European Commission’s online shopping decision underestimated the value of that fast and convenient connection, Google said in a statement at the time. Although some comparison shopping sites naturally want Google to display them more prominently, our data shows that people generally prefer to take them directly to the link of the product they want, rather than to the site they have to search repeatedly.
Google appealed the ruling, but now according to the Wall Street Journal report, the EU general court in Luxembourg upheld the previous ruling.