The UK couple, Shivaun Raff and Adam, have won a 15-year-long legal battle against Google, with the tech giant ordered to pay a fine of 2.4 billion (Rs 26,171 crore) for abusing its market dominance.
The couple, who quit their well-paying jobs launched their startup 'Foundem', which offers its price comparisons of products and charged a fee when customers click on their product listings through to other websites.
After going live, the founders noticed that their website was pushed way down the lists of search results for relevant queries like "price comparison" and "comparison shopping".
"We were monitoring our pages and how they were ranking, and then we saw them all plummet almost immediately, " Adam told BBC.
The founders initially thought their website’s faltering start had been a mistake.
“We initially thought this was collateral damage, that we had been false positive detected as spam,” Shivaun said. “We just assumed we had to escalate to the right place and it would be overturned.”
Even after two years and despite many requests, Google didn't lift the penalty. Meanwhile, their website was "ranking completely normally" on other search engines, but that didn't really matter, according to Shivaun, as "everyone's using Google".
In 2010, the couple approached the European Commission. A very long anti-trust investigation revealed that the tech giant unfairly promoted its own shopping service over competitors like Foundem.
The investigation revealed that their site was not the only one to have been put at a disadvantage by Google, 20 other claimants, including Kelkoo, Trivago and Yelp were also hit severely by google's market abuse.
The Commission ultimately ruled, in 2017, that Google abused its market dominance, imposing a fine of 2.4 billion pounds.
However, Google appealed, sparking seven years of legal battles.
In 2024, the European Court of Justice upheld the fine, rejecting Google's appeals. Google termed the ruling 'disappointing'.
