Marathon of Google antitrust hearings is a wrap at EU court

LUXEMBOURG (CN) — The European Union and Google’s parent company Alphabet finished a week of hearings before the General Court of the European Court of Justice, with references to Danish cheese, Norwegian folks music and cartoons.

Defending the $5 billion (4.34 billion euro) fine imposed by the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, for Google's dominance of the market with its Android mobile operating system, FairSearch lawyer Thomas Vinje described searching for obscure Norwegian folk music as part of an example of how Google uses the vast data it’s collected to improve its search.

Google isn’t better because it has superior algorithms or engineers, Vinje argued, but more data, which allows it to create a better search product.

The European Commission fined Google in 2018 following a three-year investigation into whether it had illegally used its dominance in the smartphone market to promote other Google products, such as Google Search and the Chrome browser. It contends that Google used its wealth to shut out search rivals by paying phone makers like Samsung and HTC to preload Google Search directly onto their devices, effectively killing off search competitors.

FairSearch, a group that lobbies against Google’s search dominance, cite status quo bias — a cognitive bias where people prefer for things to remain the same — as the heart of the problem. “Consumers stick to the service in front of them,” Vinje told the Luxembourg-based court.

The search giant concedes that an advantage does follow from requiring developers to preinstall apps like Search and Chrome, but says the advantage isn’t nearly as large as the commission claims. “Users do in fact make up their own minds,” Google lawyer Meredith Pickford said.

Google further argued that it needs that advantage to finance the costs of maintaining Android. While the company had let developers license the software for free in the EU, it switched, following the results of the commission’s investigation, to charging a fee and stopped requiring developers to bundle Search and other apps with Android.

Google says its success can be attributed to a superior product rather than anticompetitive practices. “The most common search query on Bing is by far Google,” Google attorney Alfonso Lamadrid said.

The five-day block of hearings is unusually lengthy for the EU's second-highest court, but $5 billion is also the highest ever given by the EU for anticompetitive behavior. Google, the commission and the 10 intervening parties their spat has brought to the table spent the first day of the hearings trading blows over whether Google had market dominance. Android runs on nearly 70% of mobile phones in Europe, and nearly all internet search on the continent, 97%, is queried on Google.

A metaphor that has carried throughout the proceedings is Judge Sten Nielsen's comparison of growth opportunities for search competitors to a slice of blue cheese from his homeland of Denmark.

A decision in the case is expected in the coming months. Meanwhile Google is fighting two other fines before the court for antitrust behavior. The EU’s competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager fined the company 1.49 billion euro ($1.7 billion) in 2016 for taking advantage of its search dominance to promote its targeted ad product, AdSense, and then 2.4 billion euro ($2.6 billion) in 2017 for undercutting competitors of its Comparison Shopping Service.

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