Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

On the evening of September 19, Beijing time, Google made a last-ditch attempt to overturn the $2.6 billion Google Shopping antitrust case in the European Supreme Court, the European Court of Justice (CJEU).

As early as June 2017, the European Union announced a fine of 2.42 billion euros ($2.6 billion) on Google Shopping. The reason is that Google favors its own service Google Shopping and downgrades the services of its competitors.

Google appealed the EU's ruling to the Comprehensive Court of the EU Intermediate Court. In November 2021, the Comprehensive Court rejected Google's appeal. Subsequently, Google appealed to the Supreme Court of the European Court of Justice.

At today's EU Court hearing, Google lawyer Thomas Graf said the European Commission had failed to prove that Google's different treatment of competitors was an abuse and that "differential treatment" was not anti-competitive in itself.

"usually, if there is competition between companies, they certainly don't treat their competitors as if they were themselves," Graf said. "instead, they must be treated differently. For a company, the meaning of competition is to distinguish itself from its competitors. Instead of forming an alliance with competitors, everyone is the same."

"it is unreasonable to identify each different treatment, especially for first-party and third-party companies, as abuse, which will undermine competition and undermine innovation," Graf said.

Fernando Castillo de la Torre, a lawyer for the European Commission, refuted Google's argument that it used its algorithm to unfairly favor its own shopping service, Google Shopping, in violation of the EU's antitrust law.

"Google can use its algorithm to reduce the visibility of results that are not relevant to users' queries," Fernando said. "however, they do not have the right to use its dominant position in the search field to promote the search results of their own services while lowering the ranking of competitors' search results."

The European Court of Justice will make a final decision on the case in the coming months.

In addition to the Google Shopping service, two other Google services, Google Android and Google AdSense advertising service, have also been subject to antitrust fines from the European Union, and Google has also appealed.

In the three antitrust cases, Google Shopping was fined 2.42 billion euros, Google's AdSense advertising service was fined 1.49 billion euros, and Google Android was fined 4.34 billion euros.

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