The European competition watchdog has fined Google €2.42 billion for abusing its dominance as a search engine.
The European Commission was prompted to take action after numerous complaints were made by rival firms such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, UK comparison site Foundem, and News Corp.
In a seven-year long investigation, Google was found to be systematically given prominent placement in searches to its own comparison shopping service and demoted those of rivals in search results.
The search engine has been given 90 days to stop favouring its own shopping service or face a further penalty of up to 5% of Alphabet’s average daily global turnover. Alphabet is the parent company of Google.
“What Google has done is illegal under EU antitrust rules. It denied other companies the chance to compete on the merits and to innovate. And most importantly, it denied European consumers a genuine choice of services and the full benefits of innovation,” European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in a statement. Yahoo News
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