The fences around Google continue to tighten. The final decision of the Supreme Court is awaited Court of Justice Juliane Kokott, chief prosecutor of the Court of Justice of the European Union, concluded her speech this Thursday. preliminary analysis used by technology company dominant position in the general search services market It is used as a tool to choose its own product comparison service and must pay for it. 2 billion 400 million fine The decision was implemented by the European Commission in June 2017 and was approved by the European court for the first time in four years.
In this decision, the Community Manager accused the internet giant Google of presenting the search results of its product comparison service as a priority in searches, placing them at the top and highlighting them with interesting visual and text information. ‘Shopping Unit’. In contrast, search results from rival product comparison services appeared in a lower position only in the form of blue links. The result of this strategy is that users click on Google results more often than those of competitors.
The resulting distortion data traffic The rise in Google’s public results page was not due to the better quality of Google’s product comparison service, but simply due to self-nepotism and the leverage created by the Google public results page, that is, the abuse of its dominant position in the market. general Internet search services. Competing product comparators, meanwhile, relied on the data traffic generated by Google’s public results page to achieve commercial success and stay in the market for specialized product search services.
Despite all this, the European Commission concluded that the American multinational company had abused its power. “dominant position” and was fined 2.42 million euros. Google filed an appeal, which the General Court rejected and confirmed the sanction in 2021. The company decided to appeal at the beginning of 2022. Almost two years later, the attorney general again proposed to the European supreme court that the appeal be dismissed and “confirm that Google is good.” According to Kokott, the self-nepotism for which the company is accused is “a form of autonomous abuse through the imposition of unfair conditions of access to competitive product comparison services, assuming that they produce at least potentially anti-competitive effects.” .
The view generally followed by the CJEU in most cases points out that both the Commission and the General Court correctly observed that the differential treatment of competitors due to self-interest was achieved through a leverage effect in which Google was involved. Using its dominant position in the general Internet search services market to gain a competitive advantage in the submarket for specialized product search services where it does not (yet) have such a position.