Google Challenges Record EU Antitrust Fine in Court (reuters.com)

Google appealed on Monday against a record 2.4-billion-euro ($2.9 billion) EU antitrust fine, with its chances of success boosted by Intel's partial victory last week against another EU sanction. From a report: The world's most popular Internet search engine, a unit of the U.S. firm Alphabet, launched its appeal two months after it was fined by the European Commission for abusing its dominance in Europe by giving prominent placement in searches to its comparison shopping service and demoting rival offerings.

Comments

I want a price comparison site in my Google result

[Luthair]

said no one ever.

Good to see that fines are getting realistic

[jenningsthecat]

Even Google can't dismiss a fine of almost 3 billion dollars as a mere cost of doing business. Penalties for corporate abuses need to be truly painful if they're to serve as deterrents.

Re:Good to see that fines are getting realistic

[WindBourne]

if they really are abusing their status, which I do not think that they did. Of course, with the current CEO, who knows. Pichai is a fuucking idiot and has turned Google into the next Microsoft.

It seems a little low

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's hope the appeal will double the fine.

Re:It seems a little low

[thegarbz]

Yes, they can be easily replaced

Yeah that's why all it's competitors had such a roaring success even with one company putting $5.5 billion into attempting to replace them.

with low barriers to entry

Yeah all you need to do is start and internet and mobile phone company with complete vertical integration and 100s of millions of customers world wide all promoting your search function over the competitors. Eeeeeeeeeaasy.

The whole fine is horsepucks anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the equivalent of you opening a store to sell "ACME brand" wrenches only to be told by some a$$h@t of "authoritae" that you must put up advertisements in your store for craftsman wrenches for the shop down the street. Um...no...GFY!

Don't like googles results...don't use google! And no, I don't work for, nor do I ever plan on working for google.

What if Google doesn't pay?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the EU going to do if Google just doesn't pay? Shut down access to Google? I don't think the voters would love that.

Re:What if Google doesn't pay?

[TheRaven64]

They could repossess the nice big buildings that Google owns in the middle of London, Paris, Dublin, Munich, and so on.. They could confiscate all of the advertising revenue that flows from EU companies to Google via EU banks. They could confiscate all revenue that flows through EU payment processors to the Google Play store. They could prevent mobile phones sold in the EU from including Google apps.