Google taken to court in Sweden in EUR 2.1 billion-euro claim

In Sweden, the online price comparison firm PriceRunner has announced taking the US web-services giant Google to court blaming the latter for advertising its own price comparison services in the online search results, Swedish news portal TheLocal.se reports.
The announcement came on Monday, February 7, that the Swedish firm filed its suit with the Patent and Market Court in Stockholm. The move followed the ruling of the EU General Court that Google had «breached EU antitrust laws by manipulating search results in favour of their own comparison shopping services».
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As the largest US information technology firms face fines and legal challenges in many European nations and continue to fight them, PriceRunner stated that it expected the «final damages amount of the lawsuit to be significantly higher», given that «the violation is still ongoing».
The firm’s CEO Mikael Lindahl reasoned that the lawsuit meant also standing up «for consumers, who have suffered tremendously from Google’s infringement of the competition law for the past fourteen years and still today», TheLocal.se reports.