Google sued for $2.4B for pushing its own shopping service

Google has been served a massive lawsuit for favoring its own native shopping service over competitors, in what has been called persistent monopolistic behavior.

This comes after a year-long series of allegations against the tech giant for displaying anti-competitive, monopolistic behaviors on multiple fronts when it comes to competing services. This includes favoring its own voice assistant over others, as well as holding an unfair hold of app distribution on Android phones.

Today, things are coming to another head for the California-based tech giant. A price comparison service based in Sweden, called PriceRunner, is taking on Google in a lawsuit for €2.1 billion (roughly USD $2.4 billion). 

It claims it is taking the side of customers who haven't had access to a fair distribution of price comparison services, resulting in financial damages for both the customers and the competing companies offering these services.

"We are [...] seeking compensation for the damage Google has caused us during many years," said PriceRunner CEO Mikael Lindahl in a statement. "But are also seeing this lawsuit as a fight for consumers who have suffered tremendously from Google’s infringement of the competition law for the past fourteen years and still today."

In November of 2021, the European Union's General Court rejected an appeal by Google and exacted from the giant a record fine of €2.42 billion (USD $2.8 billion) for unfairly pushing its own comparison shopping services ahead of its competitors. This court decision paved the way for PriceRunner's lawsuit, as Google had already been found guilty in that regard.

"Since the violation is still ongoing the amount of damages increases every day, we expect the final damages amount of the lawsuit to be significantly higher," wrote PriceRunner. It claims it regularly offers better-value deals than Google, resulting in daily unnecessary extra expenses on the customers' part.

Google's antitrust track record hasn't been looking great over the past months, and we will wait and see what happens between Google and PriceRunner in court. In any case, it hasn't been the first, and it certainly won't be the last such lawsuit.