by Fu Yun Chi
LUXEMBOURG, Sept 19 (Reuters) – Alphabet’s Google made a last-ditch effort in Europe’s top court on Tuesday to overturn a 2.42 billion euro ($2.6 billion) EU antitrust fine imposed on it for market abuse related to its shopping service. Did, saying that regulators failed to show up. That its practices were anti-competitive.
In 2021, Google turned to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) after the General Court challenged a fine imposed by EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager in 2017.
It was the first of three penalties for anti-competitive practices, which have cost Google a total of 8.25 billion euros in losses over the past decade.
Google lawyer Thomas Graf said the European Commission had failed to show that the company’s differential treatment of rivals was abusive and that the differential treatment alone was not anti-competitive.
He said, “Companies do not compete by treating their competitors equally. They compete by treating them differently. The whole purpose of competition is for a company to differentiate itself from rivals. Not to form alliances with rivals So that everyone becomes the same.” Panel of 15 judges.
Graf said, “Treating every different behavior, and especially different behavior with first-party and third-party businesses, as abusive will weaken competition. It will weaken the ability and incentive for companies to compete and innovate.” “
Commission lawyer Fernando Castillo de la Torre rejected Google’s arguments and said the company had used its algorithms to unfairly advantage its price comparison shopping service, in violation of EU antitrust laws. .
He said, “Google was entitled to implement algorithms that reduced the visibility of certain results that were less relevant to the user query.”
“What Google did not have the right to do was to use its dominance in general search to enhance its position on comparison shopping by promoting the results of its services, and decorating them with attractive features and applying algorithms that skew the results. are prone to push down those of competitors and show those results without attractive features,” he said.
The CJEU will rule in the coming months.
That case, and two others involving the Android mobile operating system and the AdSense advertising service, pale in comparison to the ongoing EU antitrust case into Google’s lucrative digital advertising business, where regulators threatened to break up the company in June.
Case C-48/22P is Google and Alphabet v Commission (Google Shopping)
($1 = 0.9353 euros) (Reporting by Fu Yun Chi; Editing by David Evans)
Source: finance.yahoo.com
