Alphabet’s Google has filed a last-ditch attempt at Europe’s top court to reverse a 2.42 billion euro ($2.6 billion) EU antitrust fine levied for market abuse relating to its shopping business, claiming that authorities had not proven that its actions were anti-competitive.

After the General Court dismissed Google’s appeal of the penalty imposed by EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager in 2017 in 2021, the company resorted to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).

It was the first of three anti-competitive behaviour fines that cost Google a total of 8.25 billion euros over the past ten years.

Thomas Graf, a lawyer for Google, claimed that the European Commission had failed to demonstrate that the firm’s treatment of competitors differently was abusive and that such treatment alone was not anti-competitive.

“Companies do not compete by treating competitors equally with themselves. They compete by treating them differently. The whole point of competition is for a company to differentiate itself from rivals. Not to align with rivals so that all are the same,” he told the 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. It would impair the ability and incentives of companies to compete and innovate,” Graf said.

Attorney for the Commission Fernando Castillo de la Torre rejected Google’s claims, claiming the corporation had violated EU antitrust regulations by using its algorithms to unfairly favour its price comparison shopping service.

“Google was entitled to apply algorithms that lower the visibility of certain results which were less relevant for a user query,” he said.

“What Google was not entitled to do was to use its dominance in general search in order to extend its position over comparison shopping by promoting results of its own services, and embellishing them with attractive features and apply algorithms that are prone to pushing down the results of rivals and showing those results without attractive features,” he said.

The CJEU will make a decision soon.

The current EU antitrust investigation into Google’s rich digital advertising business, where regulators threatened to split up the corporation in June, dwarfs this case and two others regarding the Android mobile operating system and the AdSense advertising service.

Case number C-48/22 P Commission v. Google and Alphabet (Google Shopping).

(Adapted from ThePrint.in)