Google has lost a 15-year legal battle against a couple in the UK and has been ordered to pay 2.4 billion pounds (about Rs 26,172 crore) in fines for abusing the market dominance of its shopping comparison service. The tech giant had appealed against the fine originally levied by the European Commission in 2017 at Europe’s top court–the European Court of Justice–but it rejected its appeal in September, BBC reported.
Google said it was "disappointed" with the ruling.
The couple who won the battle are Shivaun Raff and her husband, Adam, who recently opened up about how their trailblazing price comparison website Foundem was hit by a Google search penalty, prompted by one of the search engine’s automatic spam filters.
Ranking on Google search plummeted
It started in 2006 when the couple quit their well-paying jobs to launch their startup. Foundem offered its users price comparisons of products and charged a fee when customers clicked on their product listings through to other websites.
But immediately after the site went live, the founders noticed that it was pushed way down the lists of search results for relevant queries like "price comparison" and "comparison shopping". This means that it was barely accessible to its target audience and Foundem struggled to make any money.
"We were monitoring our pages and how they were ranking, and then we saw them all plummet almost immediately, " Adam, 58, told BBC.
Speaking to Radio 4’s The Bottom Line in their first interview since that final verdict, Shivaun and Adam explained that initially, they thought their website’s faltering start had been a mistake.
“We initially thought this was collateral damage, that we had been false positive detected as spam,” Shivaun, 55, said. “We just assumed we had to escalate to the right place and it would be overturned.”
"If you're denied traffic, then you have no business," added Adam.
'Received no response from Google'
The couple sent Google numerous requests to have the restriction lifted but, more than two years later, nothing had changed and they said they received no response.
The couple began to suspect could play by the end of 2008, when just weeks before Christmas, they received a message warning that their site was suddenly taking a lot of time to load. They first thought it was a cyber attack, "but actually it was just that everyone had started visiting our website", Adam told the media.
Eventually, Foundem was named the best price comparison website in the UK by Channel 5’s The Gadget Show.
But when they failed to secure a proper response from Google regarding the site's performance on search, Shivaun and Adam decided to approach regulators in the UK, US, and Brussels. They were, however, forced to close Foundem in 2016, but are pursuing a civil damages claim against Google, which is due to begin in the first half of 2026.
Largest penalty the European Commission had ever imposed
In 2017, it was the largest penalty the Commission had ever imposed - though it has since been supplanted by a 4.3 billion pounds fine, also against Google. In a statement, the tech giant pointed out it had made changes in 2017 to comply with the European Commission's decision.
"Our approach has worked successfully for more than seven years, generating billions of clicks for more than 800 comparison shopping services," it said.
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