Swedish court orders Google to pay $1.46 bn for favouring its price comparisons

A Swedish market court ruled on Wednesday that Google must pay nearly 14.3 billion kroner ($1.46 billion) in damages to price comparison site Pricerunner for promoting its own shopping comparisons in search results.

“Pricerunner is considered to have suffered losses as a result of Google’s illegal preference for its own price comparison service over many years,” the Patent and Market Court in Stockholm ruled. he said.

The court noted that Pricerunner, which filed the lawsuit in 2022 and has since been acquired by financial technology giant Klarna, “demanded much higher compensation but was not fully successful in its case.”

“It was a complex and comprehensive case in many respects, and although Pricerunner was unable to fully satisfy its claim, the damages awarded are undoubtedly the largest amount of damages ever awarded in a competition case in Sweden,” judge Linda Kullberg said in a statement. he said.

Pricerunner had demanded compensation totaling 64 billion kroner and additional interest of 14 billion kroner.

Dan Greaves, Klarna’s head of communications and policy, said the decision “supports a healthier, more competitive marketplace in terms of how people compare products and services, and that’s good for everyone who shops.”

Meanwhile, a Google spokesperson told AFP: “We disagree with the court’s decision, we are reviewing and will consider our legal options. The changes we made to shopping ads in 2017 are working successfully.”

Pricerunner filed the lawsuit after the General Court of the European Union ruled that Google “violated EU antitrust laws by manipulating search results in favor of its own comparison shopping services.”

The trial started in October last year.

Initially, Pricerunner said it was suing Google for approximately $2 billion, but at the time it expected “the ultimate damages amount of the case to be significantly higher” given that “the infringement is still ongoing.”

In 2021, the General Court of the European Union upheld the European Commission’s 2017 decision that “Google violated competition law by opting for its own shopping service.”

The decision was later reaffirmed by the EU Court of Justice in 2024.

In the Swedish case, the court noted that Google argued that the infringement ended in 2017, while Pricerunner argued that the infringement continued after 2017 and until at least 2023.

Pontus Scherp, a lawyer representing Pricerunner, told AFP ahead of Wednesday’s ruling that his team had argued that the changes Google implemented in 2017 were “mostly cosmetic”.

The court found that “Google’s abuse continued for a longer period of time than Google claimed, and that this abuse harmed Pricerunner.”

However, it was stated that part of the claim was made too late and it was also stated that no compensation was paid to Pricerunner for “residual damages” after the abuse stopped.

He added that the compensation awarded for the period during which Google was deemed at fault (15 years in the UK and 10 years in Sweden and Denmark) was also lower than what Pricerunner claimed.