Google loses 15-year long legal battle to UK couple, ordered to pay over Rs 26,000 crore

Google must pay a fine worth GBP 2.4 billion, over Rs 26,000 crore, to a couple in the UK, the European Court of Justice has iterated while rejecting the tech giant’s multiple appeals to overturn the original ruling from June 2017. UK’s Shivaun Raff and her husband, Adam, moved court against Google back in 2006 after their price comparison website faced a Google Search penalty, accusing the Sundar Pichai-led company of misusing the dominance of its shopping comparison service. The 15-year-long legal battle against Google has turned out to be a landmark push for calls to regulate Big Tech.

Speaking to local radio, the UK couple opened up for the first time since the final verdict, explaining the ordeal they and their pioneering website, Foundem, had to go through at Google’s mercy. They said when Foundem was hit by a Google search penalty, triggered by one of the search engine’s automatic spam filters, they thought the website’s rocky start “had simply been a mistake.” The penalty pushed the website towards the end of search results for search terms like “price comparison” and “comparison shopping,” impacting its traffic and, ultimately, earnings – which were driven by affiliate product listings.

“We initially thought this was collateral damage, that we had been false positive 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 had passed without a response. Meanwhile, Foundem’s ranking on other search engines was normal, the couple said, stressing that did not matter because “everyone’s using Google.”

It was a few months later when Shivaun and her husband realised that Foundem was not the only website to have been 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 blaming a cyber-attack for the website’s slowed performance, the couple later realised 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 benefitting your users to make it impossible for them to find us,” Shivaun told the radio. After Google acknowledged but sort of snubbed the communication, the couple decided to take up the matter legally. After informing the press, the couple reported the case to regulators in the UK, the US, and Brussels. That is when the European Commission took cognisance of the case by launching an antitrust probe against Google in November 2010. While the ruling took about seven years to come in Shivaun’s favour, the couple said they did not want to celebrate until they ensured Google complied with the EC’s decision. The tech giant made several appeals against the ruling, but the European Court of Justice rejected them each time.

“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 more than 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 battle may have turned out in Shivaun and Adam’s favour, but it was no less than an ordeal. “I think if we had known it was going to be quite as many years as it turned out to be we might not have made the same choice,” the couple said.