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A reminder of why the EU has an indispensable role in making the tech industry fairer against the bullies - but, even when armed with the best intentions, lawsuits can still take forever, and by the time you get a sentence the result may not even matter anymore.

Foundem was a website for online price aggregation and comparisons founded by a British couple in 2006.

Of course, its service competed with Google Shopping, so #Google did what it usually does with services that it perceives as competitors - it buried Foundem down in its search results, so users were unlikely to find it.

Of course, the couple noticed that their website was indexed just fine by other search engines, but of course it didn’t matter - nobody cares if your site ranks high on Bing because 92% of the folks out there use Google.

Of course, they wrote to Google to ask for explanations, and of course Google did what it does best - it behaved like a faceless company and ignored their requests.

So they brought their case to the EU antitrust folks (the UK was still in the EU and hadn’t yet shot its foot at the time). In 2010 the EU launched an investigation. In 2015 it filed formal charges. In 2017 Vestager slammed Google with a $2.5B fine for purposefully leveraging its dominant position to damage Foundem as a business.

All good then? Well, not really.

Google appealed the decision again and again, until 2021. Eventually a civil trial will start in 2026, 20 years after Foundem was damaged by Google, and the trial is likely to take years too.

And the outcome may not even matter anymore: Foundem has filed for bankruptcy in 2016, mostly because it never managed to attract enough customers because Google sabotaged them.

I really want Google to be hit hard where it hurts them the most for their anticompetitive practices. But I also demand justice to be swift. Google won’t have many incentives to change if each lawsuit takes two or three decades to get to a definitive sentence - and in the meantime they can keep doing whatever they like, and by that time the sentence comes their competitors are likely to be gone anyway.

If justice isn’t swift in delivering antitrust fines, and years pass between investigations, appeals, civil lawsuits etc., and in the meantime businesses are still impacted by unfair barriers and acts of sabotage and eventually shut down, then directors in large companies will keep seeing those fines merely as operational costs required to safeguard their monopolies.

https://www.xatakaon.com/legislation-and-rights/google-saw-this-couples-website-as-competition-and-buried-it-it-cost-the-company-2-5-billion

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