The European (EU) Commission last week fined Google more than $1 billion after claiming it breached the EU’s
Digital Markets Act (DMA). It’s one more billion added to a mounting tally that seems to have encouraged additional lawsuits from smaller rivals across Europe.
Alphabet’s company,
Google, has been hit with more than EUR10 billion in fines from the European Commission in the past decade, which is equivalent to more than $11 billion to date.
Many of those EU lawsuits
are in various stages of appeal. Dozens of these cases have prompted lawsuits from smaller rivals across Europe, according to Reuters after speaking with half a dozen lawyers and litigation
financiers, and cases filed in many countries.
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“I think this will trigger a new wave of litigation,” Thomas Hoppner, a partner at Geradin Partners, told Reuters.
Hoppner advised German price-comparison platform Idealo on suing for market abuse, and a Berlin court last year awarded Idealo €465 million in November, the largest antitrust damages award
a German court has ever handed down. He expects specialized search firms to reach further back than the new rules allow.
“They ‘may seek damages, possibly not just for the period of the
DMA but also for the years prior to the DMA breaches’ under Article 102,” he told Reuters, referring to an older EU provision that bars companies from abusing a dominant position.
About six
lawyers and litigation financiers describe a line of cases that have already filed across six
countries, with more being drafted.
One report states that private claims seek up to $10 billion, including €2.97 billion from Italy’s Moltiply Group and a Stockholm award of roughly
$1.97 billion in the PriceRunner case.
The European (EU) Commission last week fined Google more than $1 billion after claiming it breached the
EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), and required the Alphabet company to dismantle preferential treatment for the company’s advertising and content services in Europe, mandating structural changes to
advertising, search, and app ecosystems.
The EU found that Google gives preferential treatment to its own services — including shopping, hotels, transport and sports results — over
those of third parties in Google Search, breaching its obligations under the DMA.
When Google began to push its own comparison-shopping service in search results in 2008, traffic to rival
price comparison sites fell dramatically, triggering complaints and an EU probe that produced a €2.42 billion fine in 2017.
Those rivals fought back with antitrust competitive lawsuits.
For example, Google was ordered to pay nearly $2 billion to Klarna Group Plc’s Pricerunner unit in a dispute over its abuse of power for its comparison-shopping services.
The Patent and
Market Court in Stockholm, which issued the judgment, dismissed most parts of the claim in which Pricerunner sought 80 billion Swedish kronor, or roughly $8.2 billion, in the wake of a European Union
antitrust crackdown, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The company filed a multibillion-dollar lawsuit in 2022 after Google’s appeal was rejected.
Connexity, a U.K.
shopping site, in February settled with Google. On February 11, 2026, the U.K.’s Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) officially allowed the withdrawal of a major antitrust lawsuit against Google
after a confidential settlement was reached with Connexity.
The lawsuit was filed under the case name, Skimbit Limited v Google UK Limited & Others. It jointly represented Connexity UK Limited, Skimbit Limited, and Connexity Europe.
Throughout the years, lawsuits
were also filed by Moltiply Group, an Italian operator of price comparison site Trovaprezzi for €2.97 billion, LitFin Group Actions, a litigation financier backing two groups that sues
Google for more than $1 billion in Amsterdam, among others.
