Google is facing a £5 billion class action lawsuit in the UK for ‘abusing its near-total dominance’ in the online search space. The case claims that the company charged higher prices for advertisements to appear in search inquiries that it could have done within a more competitive market. The development also comes less than a month after the search engine giant paid $100 million to settle a long-running case brought by advertisers in 2011.
The latest case argues that Google shut out competition by contracting phone makers to pre-install Google Search and the Chrome browser on Android devices, and by paying Apple to make it the default search engine on iPhones. Google has also been accused of ensuring that its search search engine offers better functionality and more features for Google’s own advertising offering than that of its competitors.
The company however insisted that this lawsuit was “yet another speculative and opportunistic case”. The British Competition Appeal Tribunal had launched an investigation into Google’s search services — including their impact on advertising markets — in January.
“We will argue against it vigorously. Consumers and advertisers use Google because it is helpful, not because there are no alternatives,” a spokesperson said.
According to a 2020 study by the Competition and Markets Authority in UK found that 90% of all search advertising revenue was earned by Google. The lawsuit filed filed on Wednesday further accused the company of leveraging its dominance to ‘overcharge advertisers’ and sought to hold Google accountable. The case is being brought by by competition law academic Or Brook on behalf of hundreds of thousands of UK-based organisations.
