On Monday, the trial begins in the Patent and Market Court.
The issue of guilt has already been settled. The EU Court has established that Google has breached the competition law by exploiting its dominant position. Now it is up to individual companies to pursue damages against Google.
When you do a search for a particular product, paid shopping ads via Google appear at the top of the site. In this way, price comparison companies like Pricerunner, which has been owned by the payment company Klarna for several years, lose traffic on their site and thus revenue.
Already three years ago, Pricerunner mentioned a claim amount of 22 billion kronor. This applied until 2017. Now it has grown further to enormous 77 billion. According to the company, such a high amount has never been claimed in a Swedish court before.
"We strongly oppose"
The infringement has continued, so it has increased in scope, and then there is an interest effect, says Nicklas Storåkers, former major owner of Pricerunner, who, together with other shareholders, has a great interest in the size of the damages.
But Google strongly objects to this. They mean that after 2017, the system looks different, which is why the damages are also completely out of proportion.
"We strongly oppose this lawsuit and look forward to presenting our case in court. The changes we made in 2017 after the EU Commission's decision work well. The number of comparison sites in Europe that use the system has increased from seven then to 1,550 today, and the EU Commission has not intervened," says Joakim Larsson, communications manager at Google in Sweden, in a written comment to TT.
He also notes that Pricerunner did not want to advertise on Google's site like other comparison sites.
First out
This is about a gigantic market that Google, through its almost total dominance as a search engine on the internet, controls most of. Hence the large damages.
The damages aim at lost profits in the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Sweden. Other price comparison sites in Europe are pursuing similar damages processes against Google.
I think we are the first, as far as I know, he says.
According to studies, Google's own comparison prices, where companies pay to be high on the search giant's site, are on average significantly higher than other comparison sites.
