LUXEMBOURG: Alphabet’s Google on Tuesday made a final ditch effort at Europe’s high courtroom to overturn a 2.42 billion euro ($2.6 billion) EU antitrust advantageous imposed for market abuse associated to its buying service, saying that regulators failed to indicate that its practices had been anti-competitive.

Google turned to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) after the General Court in 2021 threw out its problem to the advantageous levied by EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager in 2017.

It was the primary of three penalties for anti-competitive practices which have price Google 8.25 billion euros in whole within the final decade.

Google lawyer Thomas Graf mentioned the European Commission had failed to indicate that the corporate’s completely different therapy of rivals was abusive and that completely different therapy alone was not anti-competitive.

«Companies do not compete by treating competitors equally with themselves. They compete by treating them differently. The whole point of competition is for a company to differentiate itself from rivals. Not to align with rivals so that all are the same,» he advised the panel of 15 judges.

«Qualifying every different treatment, and in particular different treatment of first party and third party businesses, as abusive would undermine competition. It would impair the ability and incentives of companies to compete and innovate,» Graf mentioned.

Commission lawyer Fernando Castillo de la Torre dismissed Google’s arguments, saying the corporate had used its algorithms to unfairly favour its value comparability buying service, in breach of EU antitrust legal guidelines.

«Google was entitled to apply algorithms that lower the visibility of certain results which were less relevant for a user query,» he mentioned.

«What Google was not entitled to do was to use its dominance in general search in order to extend its position over comparison shopping by promoting results of its own services, and embellishing them with attractive features and apply algorithms that are prone to pushing down the results of rivals and showing those results without attractive features,» he mentioned.

The CJEU will rule within the coming months.

This case and two others involving the Android cell working system and AdSense promoting service, nevertheless pale as compared with the continued EU antitrust case into Google’s profitable digital promoting enterprise the place regulators in June threaten to interrupt up the corporate.

(This story has been edited by News18 workers and is printed from a syndicated news company feed — Reuters)