Google rivals in Europe line up for damages after record EU fine

Published on 28/07/2026 - 9:24 GMT+2 A €890 million penalty handed down against Google by the European Union last week is turning into ammunition for a growing docket of private damages claims from tech-leaning companies across Europe. ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT The fine, the first issued under the EU's Digital Markets Act, is split into two parts. Brussels found Google had continued to favour its own services — including shopping, hotels, transport and sports results — over rival offerings in search results, undercutting fair competition and limiting the range of results available to users. Separately, it found Google had restricted app developers from steering Google Play users toward cheaper payment options outside the app. Teresa Ribera, the Commission's Executive Vice-President for a Clean, Fair and Competitive Transition, stressed that products should win on merit, not on who owns the search engine. Google has rejected the characterisation. Global affairs president Kent Walker argued the company is being forced to "strip away" features users like, such as real-time pricing and hotel and flight availability, and said the decision amounts to product degradation rather than fair competition. Who has claimed damages from Google so far In Germany, a Berlin court awarded price-comparison site Idealo €465 million in November 2025, well short of the €3.3 billion the Axel Springer-owned company had sought. Idealo said in a press release it would keep pressing its claim regardless. Co-founder Albrecht von Sonntag argued that "market abuse must have consequences" and must not become a lucrative business model. A parallel ruling in the same Berlin case awarded roughly €107 million to Testberichte.de operator Producto GmbH, against a €290 million claim. In Italy, Moltiply Group's subsidiary 7Pixel filed a €2.97 billion follow-on claim in May 2025 over harm to its Trovaprezzi.it comparison site. In a regulated public disclosure, Moltiply said the figure reflected "the structural effects of the abuse and interest" as calculated by outside experts. In Sweden, Klarna-owned PriceRunner won roughly €1.7 billion from a Stockholm court in July 2026. Why this fine changes the picture Nearly all of these cases predate Google's newest fine. They are "follow-on" damages claims built instead on the European Commission's 2017 Google Shopping decision, which found Google guilty of self-preferencing under Article 102, the bloc's older abuse-of-dominance rule. Because that violation was already established by Brussels, claimants have not had to prove it themselves in national courts, only quantify what it cost them. The new penalty covers separate and more recent conduct: continued self-preferencing in search results and anti-steering practices in the Google Play Store. It does not reopen the older cases or change their legal basis. What it does is undercut a defence Google has leaned on in the damages trials — that its 2017 changes fixed the problem and any harm was brief. A finding that the same behaviour persisted years later makes that argument harder to sustain. The new fine could also widen how far claims can reach. Because it documents more recent misconduct, companies may now be able to seek damages for those later years too, on top of the pre-2017 period already covered by the older cases — a shift likely to fuel bigger claims and new lawsuits alike.