Google must pay a fine worth GBP 2.4 billion, over Rs 26,000 crore, to a couple in the UK, as reiterated by the European Court of Justice while rejecting the tech giant’s multiple appeals to overturn the original ruling from June 2017. The UK’s Shivaun Raff and her husband, Adam, took Google to court back in 2006 after their price comparison website faced a Google Search penalty, accusing the Sundar Pichai-led company of misusing its dominance in the shopping comparison service. The 15-year-long legal battle against Google has become a landmark push for calls to regulate Big Tech.
Speaking to a local radio station, the UK couple shared their experiences for the first time since the final verdict, explaining the ordeal they and their pioneering website, Foundem, faced under Google’s dominance. They recounted that when Foundem was penalized by a Google search penalty, triggered by one of the search engine’s automatic spam filters, they initially thought the website’s rocky start “had simply been a mistake.” The penalty pushed the website to the bottom of search results for terms like “price comparison” and “comparison shopping,” significantly affecting its traffic and, ultimately, its revenue, which depended on affiliate product listings.
“We initially thought this was collateral damage, that we had been falsely detected as spam. We just assumed we had to escalate to the right place and it would be overturned,” BBC quoted Shivaun as saying. “If you’re denied traffic, then you have no business,” her husband told the host of the BBC-owned radio show. The couple said they sent several requests to Google to lift the restriction, but two years passed without a response. Meanwhile, Foundem’s ranking on other search engines remained normal, the couple noted, emphasizing that it didn’t matter because “everyone’s using Google.”
It was a few months later when Shivaun and Adam realized that Foundem was not the only website impacted by Google’s search engine. They began to suspect foul play by the end of 2008, when a few weeks before Christmas, the couple received a warning message that the website had an increased load time. Initially attributing this to a cyber-attack, the couple later realized that “everyone had started visiting our website” because Foundem was named the best price comparison website in the UK by Channel 5’s ‘The Gadget Show.’
“And that was really important because we then reached out to Google and said, look, surely it’s not benefiting your users to make it impossible for them to find us,” Shivaun told the radio. After Google acknowledged but largely dismissed their communication, the couple decided to pursue legal action. They informed the press and reported the case to regulators in the UK, the US, and Brussels. This led the European Commission to launch an antitrust probe against Google in November 2010. While the ruling took about seven years to favor Shivaun and Adam, the couple chose not to celebrate until they ensured Google complied with the EC’s decision. Google made several appeals against the ruling, but the European Court of Justice rejected each one.
“The CJEU judgement only related to how we showed product results from 2008-2017. The changes we made in 2017 to comply with the European Commission’s Shopping decision have worked successfully for more than seven years, generating billions of clicks for over 800 comparison shopping services. For this reason, we continue to strongly contest the claims made by Foundem and will do so when the case is considered by the courts,” a Google spokesperson told the radio.
The 15-year legal struggle ultimately favored Shivaun and Adam, but it was not without hardship. “I think if we had known it was going to take as many years as it did, we might not have made the same choice,” the couple reflected.
