LONDON (Reuters) – Google parent Alphabet on Wednesday asked a London tribunal to throw out a mass lawsuit that accuses the tech giant of abusing its dominance in the online search market.
The lawsuit – valued at up to 7 billion pounds ($9.3 billion) – is the latest case focusing on the business practices of Google, which is currently facing a major antitrust trial in the United States over its online advertising business.
It is also one of several multibillion-pound cases to have been filed at Britain’s Competition Appeal Tribunal in recent years, including a similar case against Google for allegedly abusing its dominance in the online advertising market.
Consumer rights campaigner and the lawsuit’s class representative Nikki Stopford argues Google’s dominance allows it to increase businesses’ costs for search advertising services which are then passed on to consumers.
Part of the lawsuit relies on the more than 4-billion-euro ($4.5 billion) fine levied on Google by the European Commission in 2018 for imposing restrictions on manufacturers of Android mobile devices, a decision being appealed by the tech company.
Stopford’s lawyers also argue Google reached an anticompetitive deal with Apple to make it the default search engine on Apple’s Safari browser in exchange for a share of Google’s mobile search ad revenues.
The lawyers asked the Competition Appeal Tribunal to certify the case to proceed towards a trial, a very early step in any mass lawsuit. Google, however, says the case is seriously flawed.
“The suggestion that consumers have been harmed by the Google conducts at issue is strongly rejected,” Google’s lawyer Meredith Pickford said in court documents.
Pickford added that the European Commission’s findings were simply “technical complaints about the particular form by which Google promoted its products”.
He also said that Google’s default search engine agreement with Apple was “in principle perfectly lawful”. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
($1 = 0.8994 euros)
(Reporting by Sam Tobin; Editing by Catarina Demony and Mark Potter)
