London, November 10 (BUS) – A top European Union court on Wednesday rejected Google’s appeal to pay a 2.4 billion euro ($2.8 billion) fine from regulators who found the tech giant abused its massive online access by giving its shopping recommendations a feature. illegal. in search results.
The European Commission, the largest competition watchdog in the 27-nation bloc, sanctioned Google in 2017 for unfairly directing visitors to its shopping service, Google Shopping, at the expense of competitors.
The EU General Court has ruled it “largely rejects” Google’s antitrust penalty appeal and upholds the fine, according to an AP report.
“The general court therefore rules that, in effect, Google prefers its own Comparative Shopping service to competing services, rather than one better result over another,” it said in a press release.
Google said it made changes in 2017 to comply with the European Commission’s decision.
“Our approach has worked for more than three years, and has generated billions of clicks for more than 700 services compared to shopping,” Google’s statement said.
The fine was part of European regulators’ efforts to curb the internet giant’s influence on the continent. This was followed by two other impressive antitrust sanctions against Google, totaling 8.25 billion euros ($9.5 billion), which the company also appealed.
The sanctions were early indications in the European Union’s crackdown on tech companies, which has expanded to include other digital giants in Silicon Valley.
This year the commission launched new antitrust investigations into whether Google and Facebook are stifling competition in the digital and classifieds ad markets.
It has also investigated Apple over payments and Amazon over concerns that it is competing unfairly with independent merchants on its platform with its own products.
Meanwhile, the European Union and the United Kingdom are drafting new rules to make social media companies more accountable for illegal and harmful content on their platforms, with the threat of fines of up to 10% of global annual revenue if they do not comply.
The case began after the Commission received a complaint in 2009 that led to an investigation, in which regulators in the European Union demanded that Google change the way it presents search results in Europe.
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