Swedish court hits Google with a $1.5B antitrust bill for burying PriceRunner

The legal battle kicked off when Klarna, the shopping-payment powerhouse, bought PriceRunner and decided to collect on years of lost revenue. The Swedish court ultimately agreed that the search giant was illegally boosting its own shopping service in search results, creating a completely unfair playing field. While the final award ended up around $1.5 billion, the total bill including interest is climbing closer to $1.97 billion, even though the plaintiffs originally swung for a massive $8 billion payday.

This whole mess dates back to 2008, when the search monopoly decided that organic competition was overrated and started putting its own comparison tools in the most prominent digital real estate. The European Commission noticed this behavior and slapped the company with a massive antitrust fine years ago, which essentially opened the floodgates for local players to demand their lunch money back.

Now, the corporate giant is facing a coordinated firing squad of lawsuits across the continent. German courts already squeezed out millions for Idealo and Producto, while similar battles are raging in the UK with Kelkoo and Foundem. Even Italy is joining the feast, with Moltiply Group chasing a massive multi-billion claim for its service Trovaprezzi.it. Representatives of the American corporation continue to state that they fixed their ad formats back in 2017 to promote fair play, and they are currently preparing to appeal the Swedish ruling.

Watching a trillion-dollar monopoly get slowly nibbled to death by a thousand European antitrust lawsuits is the ultimate corporate soap opera. If every local search tool they suffocated over the last two decades successfully sues for damages, the search giant might actually have to start paying taxes—or worse, build a search engine that actually works honestly.

Source: Reuters