Google’s long and expensive relationship with European regulators is entering a new and more dangerous phase, as a landmark $1 billion fine opens the door to a wave of private lawsuits from rivals seeking as much as $10 billion in damages.
The exposure follows the first penalty ever imposed on Google under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, the bloc’s flagship law for reining in dominant platforms. Regulators fined the company roughly $1 billion for favouring its own services and for stopping app developers from steering users toward cheaper options outside Google Play. According to a tally of cases and interviews with half a dozen lawyers and litigation financiers cited by Reuters, smaller competitors across at least six countries are now lining up to sue.
What makes the DMA fine so combustible is not its size, which by Google’s standards is almost routine, but what it represents. The ruling is a formal finding that Google is still engaging in self-preferencing, here and now, rather than years ago, and lawyers say that finding of ongoing wrongdoing may embolden more parties to file. In a European damages system where a regulator’s infringement decision can serve as binding proof of the violation, a fresh finding is less a headline than a loaded weapon handed to every rival with a grievance.
Those grievances go back a long way. When Google began pushing its own comparison shopping service to the top of search results in 2008, traffic to rival price comparison sites collapsed, triggering the complaints that produced a €2.42 billion EU fine in 2017. Google fought that ruling all the way to Europe’s top court and lost last year, and the follow-on claims have been stacking up ever since.
The numbers already landing are not small. In the PriceRunner case, a Stockholm court in July ordered Google to pay roughly $1.97 billion including interest, the largest competition damages award in Swedish history, though a ruling Klarna, PriceRunner’s owner, does not expect to collect on any time soon. German courts have separately awarded around €465 million to comparison site Idealo and €107 million to a platform called Producto, while Italy’s Moltiply Group, which runs Trovaprezzi.it, is chasing roughly €2.97 billion.
The UK front is busy too. Price comparison firm Kelkoo, which is seeking billions of pounds across various claims, told Reuters the latest EU fines could strengthen ongoing cases. “We expect these to be impacted somewhat by the DMA decision because it shows that Google is still self-referencing even to this day,” Kelkoo chief executive Richard Stables said, adding that the decision gave others more ground to sue.
The litigation funders backing these fights are equally blunt about where things are heading. Matej Pardo, chief operating officer at LitFin, which is bankrolling two groups suing Google in Amsterdam over its shopping auctions for more than $1 billion combined, said plenty of claims are already filed and more are being prepared.
Google, for its part, is playing the clock. Lawyers say the company is counting on time working in its favour, given that these cases can grind on for years, and it may yet challenge the DMA fine itself. The shopping saga is the cautionary tale: nearly two decades passed between the alleged abuses and the moment Google finally exhausted its appeals. “By that time, they’ve already monopolised many markets,” Pardo said, describing the fines as “a cost of doing business” and warning that wait times could stretch to eight years.
That is the uncomfortable subtext running under all of it. For a company whose cumulative EU competition liability now runs into the billions, even a $10 billion damages wave may register as an expensive but survivable toll, paid slowly, long after the markets in question have already been won. Whether the DMA changes that calculation, or simply adds another line to the invoice, is the question Europe’s regulators have not yet answered.
Source: Reuters
