Google just got handed a bill that makes even a tech giant wince. The Stockholm Patent and Market Court ordered Alphabet to pay Klarna’s subsidiary PriceRunner approximately $1.5 billion, or 14.3 billion Swedish kronor, in antitrust damages. It is the largest competition-related award ever granted by a Swedish court.
The ruling, issued on July 1, caps a legal saga that stretches back nearly a decade to when European regulators first flagged Google’s habit of putting its thumb on the scale in search results. For Klarna, the buy-now-pay-later company that acquired PriceRunner in 2022, this is a massive financial windfall.
The case against Google’s shopping favoritism
The foundation of this lawsuit was laid in 2017, when the European Commission found that Google had been systematically favoring its own comparison shopping service in search results. When you searched for a product on Google, the company’s own shopping tool got prime real estate at the top of the page, while competitors like PriceRunner got buried further down in results.
That EU finding opened the door for companies harmed by Google’s practices to seek damages in national courts. PriceRunner, a price comparison platform popular in Scandinavia, was among those that stepped up.
