Alphabet has reportedly requested a London tribunal to dismiss a large-scale lawsuit alleging that the Google parent company has abused its dominance in the online search market.
The lawsuit, potentially worth up to £7bn, is the latest in a series of legal challenges confronting the tech giant. It is also involved in a major antitrust trial in the US concerning its online advertising practices.
At the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal, this case is one among several high-value legal actions filed against the company recently. Another one is for allegedly misusing its position in the online advertising sector.
Google advertising dominance faces legal scrutiny
Earlier this month, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) provisionally concluded that Google had been engaging in anti-competitive practices within the open-display ad tech sector, potentially harming thousands of UK publishers and advertisers.
According to consumer rights campaigner Nikki Stopford, who represents the class in this lawsuit, Google’s market dominance enables it to inflate costs for search advertising services, with the additional expenses being passed on to consumers.
The lawsuit references a €4.34bn fine imposed on Google by the European Commission (EC) in 2018 for restricting Android mobile device manufacturers, a ruling Google is currently appealing.
Stopford’s legal team also contends that Google engaged in an anti-competitive agreement with Apple, making Google the default search engine on Apple’s Safari browser in exchange for a share of mobile search ad revenues.
The lawyers urged that the Competition Appeal Tribunal certify the case to advance to trial, a preliminary step in any mass lawsuit. In response, Google argues that the lawsuit is fundamentally flawed. “The suggestion that consumers have been harmed by the [conduct] at issue is strongly rejected,” contended the search giant’s lawyer, Meredith Pickford, in court documents.
Pickford also described the EC’s findings as mere “technical complaints about the particular form by which Google promoted its products”. She also defended the default search engine agreement with Apple as “in principle perfectly lawful”.
Challenges in Europe for search giant
Alphabet’s legal challenges in the UK coincide with a recent win for Google in overturning a €1.49bn antitrust fine imposed by the European Union (EU). This ruling underscores the mixed success of the EU’s efforts to regulate big tech under outgoing EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager.
The EU fined Google in 2019 for allegedly abusing its market position by blocking websites from using ad brokers other than its AdSense platform for search advertisements, citing anti-competitive practices from 2006 to 2016. However, the Luxembourg-based General Court annulled the fine, arguing that the EC had not taken all relevant factors into account, even though the court largely agreed with the Commission’s assessment of Google’s dominance.
On the other hand, the EU announced that the General Court upheld most of the fine imposed on Qualcomm for abusing its dominant position, reducing it from €242m to approximately €238.7m.
Furthermore, Reuters reported that Google made a significant move to resolve an EU antitrust investigation by offering to sell its advertising marketplace AdX. However, European publishers rejected the proposal as inadequate, stated the news agency citing two undisclosed sources with knowledge of the matter.
Google’s profitable ad tech business came under EU regulatory scrutiny last year after a complaint from the European Publishers Council.
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