UK hits Google with multi-billion dollar antitrust lawsuit

Already facing the possibility of being broken up in the US, American tech giant Google has now been additionally sued in the United Kingdom. Once again, the lawsuit concerns allegations of stifling competition.

Next week, a US federal judge will hear arguments from the Department of Justice (DOJ) about why the court should break up Google in order to remedy the company’s monopoly in internet search.

The DOJ is also awaiting a judge’s decision on the giant’s dominance in advertising technology.

As expected, Google denies all wrongdoing. In any case, there’s undeniably a lot on its plate – and now, there’ll be even more.

That’s because a new £5 billion class action filed at the United Kingdom’s competition appeal tribunal argues that Google has taken actions that enable the company to charge higher prices for the promotions that appear in search queries than it otherwise could in a fairer market.

The claim, brought by British competition law academic Dr. Or Brook, represented by law firm Geradin Partners, argues that Google did so by abusing its dominant position in the digital economy.

“Google is accused of forcing phone manufacturers and network operators to pre-install Google Search and Chrome on Android devices as well as paying Apple billions of pounds to set Google as the default search engine on Safari, the pre-installed browser for all Apple devices,” says the lawsuit.

The action is being taken on behalf of thousands of British organizations that published Google ads from January 2011 until now. Damages of up to £5 billion ($6.6 billion) are being sought.

Google’s anti-competitive tactics ensure its default position and prevent rivals from competing in the general search and search advertising markets, Geradin Partners’ press release reads. This has driven up prices for search advertising, causing significant losses to those paying for such advertising.

“Google is one of the most powerful companies in the world. However, through a range of deliberate and exclusionary practices, it has sought to eliminate its rivals and dominate the search advertising market, ultimately overcharging UK advertisers by billions of pounds,” said Damien Geradin, founder of Geradin Partners.

Google, already facing several investigations that relate to its digital advertising market dominance, has called this particular lawsuit a “speculative and opportunistic case.”

“We will argue against it vigorously. Consumers and advertisers use Google because it is helpful, not because there are no alternatives,” the company’s spokesperson said in a statement.

In fact, in the US, Federal Judge Amit Mehta found already in August that Google illegally maintained a search monopoly. The DOJ and a group of states have officially asked a federal court to force Google to sell its popular Chrome browser, the company calling the proposal “wildly overboard.”

In March, the European Commission also accused Google of breaking its competition rules for digital markets by prioritizing search engine results that pointed to Alphabet’s own services over those of rivals.