The European Commission has fined Google 2.42 billion euro for breaching EU antitrust rules after determining the company abused its market dominance as a search engine by giving an illegal advantage to its comparison shopping service product: enforcers believe that the giant thwarted smaller shopping search services by presenting shopping results at the top of its search screen. This is the biggest fine that Google has faced yet, and it has 90 days to comply by giving equal treatment to rival sites.



Google’s lawyer Kent Walker said the company respectfully disagrees with the EU’s conclusions and will consider a court appeal, according to a blog post. “When you shop online, you want to find the products you’re looking for quickly and easily,” Walker said. “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 think our current shopping results are useful and are a much-improved version of the text-only ads we showed a decade ago.”

Discussion

Source: [H]ardOCP – Google Gets Record .7 Billion EU Fine for Skewing Searches