Google has lost a seven-year battle with the European Commission, as the EU’s highest court upheld a $2.7 billion antitrust fine against the search giant, Reuters reports. Antitrust regulators originally fined Google in 2017 for preferentially promoting its own shopping service over local rivals.
“Google’s strategy for its comparison shopping service was not simply about attracting customers by positioning its product as superior to its competitors’ products,” EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said at the time. “Instead, Google abused its market dominance as a search engine by promoting its own comparison shopping service in its search results and downplaying competitors’ services.”
Google lost its first appeal to a lower court in 2021, sending the appeal to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Luxembourg. The company argued that it was being penalised for its dominant position in the market and that the original decision “erred in law… by treating quality improvements as abusive.”
However, the CJEU judges upheld the lower court’s decision that the company is allowed to have a dominant position but must not abuse it. “In particular, conduct by undertakings in a dominant position that has the effect of impeding competition on the merits and that is likely to harm individual undertakings and consumers is prohibited,” they said.
An unnamed Google spokesperson has already responded to the decision, saying the company is “disappointed” by the decision. “This decision relates to a very specific set of facts. We made changes in 2017 to comply with the European Commission’s decision. Our approach has worked successfully for over seven years, generating billions of clicks for more than 800 comparison shopping services,” they said.
Google is also fighting a legal battle in the European Union that could force it to sell parts of its ad tech businesses, on similar arguments that it favors its own services over competitors. The EU Commission preliminarily found that since Google is unlikely to change its behavior, only a “mandatory divestment” of part of its services would address competition concerns. In total, Google has accumulated 8.25 billion euros ($9.12 billion) in EU antitrust fines over the past ten years.
Section 31 is a TV streaming movie that focuses on Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) after her exit from Star Trek: Discovery. It was originally greenlit as a series in 2019, but for a variety of reasons, it languished in development hell until 2022.
Meanwhile, showrunners Bo Yeon Kim and Erica Lippoldt worked on the idea in collaboration with credited screenwriter Craig Sweeney.
Director Olatunde Osunsanmi told SFX Magazine (via TrekMovie) that Sweeney would eventually write (and rewrite) the project seven different times, first as a TV series, then as a film. Trek chief Alex Kurtzman was eager to begin production to take advantage of Yeoh’s 2022 Academy Award win.