Google Loses 15-Year Legal Battle Over Market Dominance, Ordered to Pay £2.4 Billion - Read Now

Google has lost a 15-year legal battle with a couple in the UK and has been ordered to pay 2.4 billion pounds, or around Rs 26,172 crore, in fines for abusing the market dominance of its shopping comparison service. The tech giant had appealed against the fine originally levied by the European Commission in 2017 at Europe's top court–the European Court of Justice–and it rejected its appeal in September, the BBC reported.

Google said it was "disappointed" by the ruling.

The couple who won the battle are Shivaun Raff and her husband, Adam, who recently opened up how their trailblazing price comparison website Foundem was hit by a Google search penalty, prompted by one of the search engine's automatic spam filters.

Ranking on Google search plummeted

It started back in 2006 when this couple quit their good paying jobs to start the venture. Foundem presented its users with price comparisons of products and charged for each click by customers onto their product listings through other websites.

But immediately after launching the site, the founders realized that it was pushed way down the lists of search results for relevant queries like "price comparison" and "comparison shopping". That is, it was barely accessible to its target audience and Foundem struggled to make any money.
"We tracked our pages and how they ranked, and then saw them all plummet almost overnight, " Adam, 58, told the BBC.
Appearing for the first time since the final judgment in Radio 4's The Bottom Line, Shivaun and Adam described how, at the start, they thought that their website had flopped.
"We just thought it was collateral damage, we're a false positive and just got marked as spam," said Shivaun, 55. "Just assumed you had to go to the right place, and that would overturn."
"If they deny your traffic, you have no business," added Adam.
'Received no response from Google'
The couple tried to get Google to remove the restriction and sent it several requests over more than two years, with nothing changing and no responses from the company.
The couple had started to suspect could play by the end of 2008, when just weeks before Christmas, they received a message warning that their site was suddenly taking a lot of time to load. They first thought it was a cyber attack, "but actually it was just that everyone had started visiting our website", Adam told the media.
Finally, Foundem emerged to become the UK's leading price comparison website branded by Channel 5's The Gadget Show.

However, as Google failed to produce the appropriate response to Shivaun and Adam in the issue of how search worked with the site, they decided to seek assistance from the regulators in the UK, US, and Brussels. Though they were obliged to close down Foundem in 2016, Shivaun and Adam filed a civil damages claim against Google that is to commence in the first half of 2026. Biggest penalty issued by the European Commission so far.

It was the largest penalty ever levied by the Commission at that time - although that was later surpassed by a 4.3 billion pounds fine imposed on Google, also in May last year. The technology company said that it has been upgraded since 2017 and meets the decision handed down by the European Commission.

"Our strategy has worked well for over seven years, and we have obtained billions of clicks for more than 800 comparison shopping services," it said.

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