Google makes effort at EU's top court to overturn $2.6B antitrust fine - report
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Google said at the EU's top court that regulators failed to show that its practices were anti-competitive, in a last round of efforts to overturn a â¬2.42B ($2.6B) EU antitrust fine imposed for market abuse related to its shopping service, Reuters reported.
The Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) unit had gone to the Court of Justice of the European Union, or CJEU, after the General Court in 2021 quashed its challenge to fine imposed by EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager in 2017. It was the first of three fines for anti-competitive practices which have cost Google â¬8.25B in total in the last decade, the report added.
The case and two others involve the Android mobile operating system and AdSense advertising service.
Thomas Graf, Google's lawyer, said the European Commission, or EC, had failed to show that the company's different treatment of competitors was abusive and that different treatment alone was not anti-competitive.
"Companies do not compete by treating competitors equally with themselves. They compete by treating them differently," Graf said to a panel of 15 judges. "Qualifying every different treatment, and in particular different treatment of first party and third party businesses, as abusive would undermine competition."
Fernando Castillo de la Torre, EC's lawyer, dismissed Google's arguments, noting that the company used its algorithms to unfairly favour its price comparison shopping service, in breach of EU antitrust rules.
The CJEU will take a decision in the coming months.
In June, reportedly the EC was considering calling for Google to sell part of its advertising-technology business as part of a new antitrust complaint.

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