Investing.com – The European Commission (EC) hit Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) with a record fine of €2.42 billion ($2.7 billion) Tuesday for abusing market dominance.
“Google has abused its market dominance as a search engine by giving an illegal advantage to another Google product, its comparison shopping service,” the EC declared on Tuesday.
The ruling for a breach of European Union (EU) antitrust rules requires to end the conduct within 90 days or or face penalty payments of up to 5% of the average daily worldwide turnover of Alphabet, Google's parent company.
Commissioner Margrethe Vestager who heads EU competition policy praised Google’s “many innovative products”, but said that the comparison shopping service wasn’t just about attracting customers by making its product better than rivals.
“Instead, Google abused its market dominance as a search engine by promoting its own comparison shopping service in its search results, and demoting those of competitors,” Vestager claimed.
“It denied other companies the chance to compete on the merits and to innovate. And most importantly, it denied European consumers a genuine choice of services and the full benefits of innovation," she concluded.
Waiting for the U.S. open, shares of Google parent Alphabet were down 1.29% to $940.00 in pre-market trade.