Four years after it was levied and subsequently appealed, the European General Court on November 10 upheld the European Commission's whopping $2.7 billion fine on Google, according to a press release. Google was accused of favourably placing its own comparison shopping service over others, thereby reducing the traffic of competing services. The General Court rejected Google's defense that this happened due to the presence of merchant platforms (online sales platforms like Amazon, eBay) or due to Google's inability to 'provide the equal treatment the commission wanted' on technical and service quality grounds. A Google spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that it was too early to comment on whether the tech giant would appeal this decision before the European Court of Justice, the region's top court; although, court documents say an appeal has to be filed within 2 months. Since 2017, Google has reportedly made changes to its policies like allowing rival shopping-comparison sites to bid for ad slots atop Google search results that they can then resell, and changing the format for the ads to get those sites more traffic. Important observations made by the court On anti-competitiveness in comparison shopping market: The court observed that Google's practice was harmful as it diverted a lot of traffic away from third-party services as users mostly look at only the first few results. It also said that given that the search engine reflects the most relevant search results at the top, that its own service showed up at the top hints at an anomaly. It upheld…
