Google Sued By UK in $6.6 Billion Class Action Lawsuit for Anti-Competitive Practices
By The Blog Source
The UK court is suing Google for £5 billion ($6.6 billion) on the grounds that the tech company artificially inflated search ad pricing due to its market dominance. Claiming to have cost British companies billions of pounds, the class action lawsuit claims the tech behemoth skewed the system to its advantage.
On Wednesday, a group of plaintiffs sued the United Kingdom's Competition Appeal Tribunal, claiming 6.6 billion dollars in damages. This lawsuit asserts that Google engaged in anti-competitive practices by obstructing other search engines and coercing companies into using its ad services. Global regulators are continuing to probe Google's monopoly strength, and the company has labeled the lawsuit as "speculative" and vowed to defend it.
An enormous class action lawsuit accusing the internet giant of abusing its control in the search advertising industry is threatening to cost Google £5 billion ($6.6 billion) and bring it under criticism in the UK. Claiming that Google inflated advertising prices for hundreds of thousands of UK-based businesses from 2011 to the present, the action was filed this week in the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal.
The case centers on the claim that Google used its dominance in the search industry to exclude competitors and establish itself as the sole option for online ad placement. Claiming that Google paid Apple billions to be the default search engine in Safari, secured pre-installation deals with Android smartphone makers, and optimized its Search Ads 360 platform to work better with its services than with rivals, the lawsuit is being spearheaded by competition law expert Or Brook and supported by law firm Geradin Partners.
Google has become a gatekeeper to digital markets, and Brook highlighted the ramifications for UK businesses by saying that they now have "almost no choice" except to pay for visibility. In 2020, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) conducted research that found 90% of all search advertising revenue in the UK was taken by Google. This statistic lends credence to the assertion.
Cases like this one reflect problems that Google has encountered in other countries. A federal judge in the United States has found that the corporation has been operating illegally as a monopoly in the search and text ad industries for more than ten years. In the meantime, Google is still fighting a record-breaking €4.3 billion fine handed down to the company in 2018 for misusing its Android OS's dominance in the European market.
To which Google responded by calling the UK case "speculative and opportunistic," arguing that companies employ Google goods not because they are ineffective but because they are effective.
Several tech companies, like Apple, Google, and Meta, are required to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in the European Union, which seeks to prohibit their misuse of dominant positions. This framework in the UK is comparable to the DMA. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which is expected to announce its ruling in October, states that "more than 200,000 British businesses advertise on it" and "90% of searches are conducted" on Google's search engine.
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