Google's 10-year long antitrust dispute with the European Union is about to get messier in the coming days as the online search empire fights in a three-day showdown of penalties that cost the company almost $9 billion.
The European Union's General Court will host a three-day proceeding on February 12 as the Alphabet Inc. division seeks to overturn a 2.4 billion-euro ($2.6 billion) fine in 2017 for impeding smaller shopping search services.
European Union regulators claimed that Google preferred its own online shopping service at the expense of its competitors. Google nevertheless strongly disagreed with the decision of the regulator, prompting it to take the case to Luxembourg's general tribunal.
As per the Bloomberg report, in the case, Google would try to show the court that the EU antitrust fine is "false on law, evidence, and economics." Google's objective is to thwart the penalty and free itself from the constraints of the EU.
Legal counsels say the court battle will help set the stage for a wider clampdown on American tech titans by Margrethe Vestager, the EU antitrust chief.
Apple Inc. is battling its own massive back-tax order and Amazon.com Inc. is currently under scrutiny for allegedly preferring its own goods over those of the platform's third-party clients.
European regulators will hope to repeat a 2007 win over Microsoft Corp., a narrow triumph in a highly-complicated probe that led the company to settle another investigation into online search issues.
The Microsoft case has stiffened the resolve of the small group of industry monitoring personnel in the EU to take on Intel Corp., Qualcomm Inc. and pick up complaints against Google in 2010.
The EU top brass are scheduled to announce new measures to establish a unified European information database whose goal is to challenge the influence of Google, Facebook, and Amazon, Reuters bared.
Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg will meet with the top-ranking tech figures of the European Union on February 17, EU officials disclosed Tuesday, days before the two parties present their arguments to rein in US tech giants as well as their Chinese rivals.
Since 2017, the EU has slapped Google with three antitrust penalties running to approximately $10 billion. In addition to the fine associated with shopping search results, in 2018 the EU also fined Google for around $5 billion. In that case, regulators found fault in Google's terms of licensing for its Android app to smartphone manufacturers.
The regulator found after years of investigations that Google was wrongly targeting mobile phone makers. The regulator explicitly had a problem with the demand that Android manufacturers preload Google apps into their smartphones. Google is also in court appealing the antitrust fine for Android.
