Years of searching for the cheapest flight or washing machine on Google may have hidden the best deal. Rivals across Europe are now suing the search giant for damages after the EU’s record antitrust fine last week. The case will decide whether Europe’s toughest Big Tech law can actually force change.
Lawyers and litigation financiers expect last week’s €890m fine against Google, the first ever issued under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), to embolden dozens of smaller European rivals to seek damages. The claims target not only the recent DMA breach but years of alleged abuse under older EU competition rules.
The $10bn queue for damages
Germany’s Idealo has gone furthest so far. A Berlin court awarded the price comparison site €465m in November, the largest sum a German court has ever granted for a competition infringement. Sweden’s PriceRunner, backed by the financial group Klarna, secured roughly $1.97bn including interest from a Stockholm court in July.
More firms are lining up. Italy’s Moltiply Group, which runs the comparison site Trovaprezzi.it, is seeking €2.97bn. Britain’s Kelkoo is pursuing claims worth billions of pounds, while two litigant groups in Amsterdam are seeking more than $1bn combined over Google’s shopping auctions.
Litigation financiers say further claims are already being prepared. Google has already paid €10.4bn in EU fines for anticompetitive practices over the past decade. A 2017 penalty of €2.42bn targeted its shopping service; a €4.1bn fine followed over its Android operating system. Google fought both and lost on appeal.
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Testing Europe’s toughest law
The outcome carries weight well beyond Google. Meta, Amazon and Apple all face their own DMA investigations, and the case will show whether the law can genuinely change corporate behaviour or whether large firms can simply outlast it.
The DMA is a very good piece of legislation. The defect maybe is that it’s so effective that they’re afraid to use it.
— Marco Pescarmona, Chairman, Moltiply Group
Marco Pescarmona, chairman of Moltiply, welcomed the strength of the legislation but questioned whether Brussels is willing to use it consistently: “The DMA is a very good piece of legislation. The defect maybe is that it’s so effective that they’re afraid to use it.”
Google appears to be betting on time. Nearly 20 years passed between the first alleged abuse in the Google Shopping case and the exhaustion of its appeals. Matej Pardo of litigation financier LitFin, which backs two of the Amsterdam claims, expects appeals in the current cases to drag on for up to eight years, calling the fines a cost of doing business that a dominant platform can absorb.
The stakes are higher for Google than the numbers alone suggest. Alphabet posted negative free cash flow in the second quarter for the first time since going public, just as spending on artificial intelligence accelerates. A prolonged legal war, on top of that spending, would test not only the DMA’s teeth, but how much a company under financial pressure is willing to keep paying to avoid changing course.
