News

Google Fined £2.1bn for Skewing Searches

Following a ruling by the European Commission (EC), Google must pay a record fine of €2.4 billion (£2.1bn) for promoting its own shopping services. The company is accused of skewing Google searches in its own favour. In addition, Google must end its anti-competitive practices or face further sanctions.

Antitrust

The EC opines that Google’s practices harm competition and violate European antitrust laws. Margrethe Vestager, European Commissioner for Competition, says:

“What Google has done is illegal under EU antitrust rules. It has denied other companies the chance to compete on the merits and to innovate. And most importantly, it has denied European consumers the benefits of competition, genuine choice of services and innovation.”

Google Responds

Of course, Google disputes the charge. In a rebuttal on its blog, Google’s SVP and General Counsel Kent Walker accuses the EC of ignorance. He adds that the company will consider appealing against the ruling. Walker writes:

“When you shop online, you want to find the products you’re looking for quickly and easily. And advertisers want to promote those same products. That’s why Google shows shopping ads, connecting our users with thousands of advertisers, large and small, in ways that are useful for both.

We believe the European Commission’s online shopping decision underestimates the value of those kinds of fast and easy connections. While some comparison shopping sites naturally want Google to show them more prominently, our data shows that people usually prefer links that take them directly to the products they want, not to websites where they have to repeat their searches.

We think our current shopping results are useful and are a much-improved version of the text-only ads we showed a decade ago. Showing ads that include pictures, ratings, and prices benefits us, our advertisers, and most of all, our users. And we show them only when your feedback tells us they are relevant. Thousands of European merchants use these ads to compete with larger companies like Amazon and eBay.”

Ashley Allen

Disqus Comments Loading...

Recent Posts

Intel Arc B580 Vulkan and OpenCL Results Leak, Showing Similar Performance to RTX 4060

We are just days away from seeing Intel’s new Arc B series graphics cards in…

1 min ago

ViewSonic Preparing 27-inch 520Hz OLED Monitor for CES 2025

ViewSonic is set to unveil a groundbreaking 27-inch OLED monitor at the upcoming CES, featuring…

12 mins ago

Ubisoft Considers Tencent Acquisition After Challenging 2024

Ubisoft is still struggling after a difficult 2024, a year marked by the closure of…

20 mins ago

Sparkle Intel ARC A770 ROC Luna OC Edition 16GB GDDR6 Graphics Card

Clock SpeedsMax. GPU Clock (Boost)2300 MHzMax. Memory Clock17500 MHzMax. GPU Clock (Base)2100 MHzProduct seriesProduct Series/FamilyARCColourPrimary…

1 hour ago

Synology Diskstation DS423+ 4 Bay Home and Office NAS Enclosure

The versatile DS423+ can serve as a central storage device as well as a multimedia…

1 hour ago

Intel Core i5-12600K 3.70GHz (Alder Lake) Socket LGA1700 Processor 

Thermal SpecificationsMax. TDP125 WCPUCPU ManufacturerIntelCPU SeriesIntel Core i5CPU Socket1700CPU ArchitectureIntel Alder Lake-SCPU Cores10CPU Threads16Performance Cores6Efficiency…

1 hour ago