GoogleIt faces more than 5 billion pounds (about 6.6 billion U.S. dollars) in potential damages lawsuits in the United Kingdom, accusing the U.S. technology giant of abusing its "near monopoly position" in the online search market to drive up advertising prices. A class action lawsuit filed at the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal on Wednesday (April 17) claims that Google has consolidated its market dominance by restricting rival search engines, making itself the only viable option for online search advertising.
The lawsuit was brought by competition law scholar O'Brook on behalf of hundreds of thousands of British organizations that used Google's search advertising services between January 1, 2011 and the lawsuit. Brooker said in a statement on Tuesday: "Today, British businesses, regardless of size, have little choice but to use Google ads. Regulators around the world describe Google as a monopoly and getting a presence on the Google homepage is crucial for businesses. Google has been using its dominance of the general search and search advertising markets to overcharge advertisers."
Market research from the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in 2020 shows that Google accounts for 90% of the search advertising market revenue. The lawsuit points out that Google has used various methods to limit search competition, including signing agreements with smartphone manufacturers to pre-install Google search and Chrome browsers, and paying Apple billions of dollars to ensure that it becomes the default search engine for Safari browsers.
This is the latest legal challenge facing the technology giant. U.S. tech giants from Google to Meta have faced numerous lawsuits, regulatory investigations and fines in recent years over issues of power and influence. In 2018, the European Union fined Google 4.3 billion euros for abusing the dominance of the Android system. Google is still appealing the ruling.
In January this year, the British CMA expressed concerns about competition in the cloud computing market and recommended investigating Amazon and Microsoft under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Act. A previous class action lawsuit in December 2024 accused Microsoft of overcharging rival cloud service customers, with a claim amount of more than 1 billion pounds.