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By Foo Yun Chee
BRUSSELS (Reuters) -Alphabet’s Google was hit with a 2.1-billion-euro ($2.3 billion) lawsuit by 32 media teams together with Axel Springer and Schibsted on Wednesday, alleging that they’d suffered losses because of the firm’s practices in digital promoting.
Shares of the Mountain View, California-based firm fell greater than 2%.
The transfer by the group – which embrace publishers in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain and Sweden – comes as antitrust regulators additionally crack down on Google’s advert tech enterprise.
“The media corporations concerned have incurred losses attributable to a much less aggressive market, which is a direct results of Google’s misconduct,” an announcement issued by their attorneys Geradin Companions and Stek mentioned.
“With out Google’s abuse of its dominant place, the media corporations would have acquired considerably larger revenues from promoting and paid decrease charges for advert tech companies. Crucially, these funds may have been reinvested into strengthening the European media panorama,” the attorneys mentioned.
They cited the French competitors authority’s 220-million-euro wonderful towards Google on its advert tech enterprise in 2021 in addition to the European Fee’s prices final yr to buttress their group declare.
“If there may be comply with by means of to the regulatory scrutiny, Google might have to curtail its practices and supply extra constant, predicable pricing to its promoting prospects,” D.A. Davidson & Co analyst Gil Luria mentioned.
The lawsuit comes at a time when Google’s core promoting enterprise is dealing with an existential menace from the shift to generative AI chat, Luria added.
In an announcement, a spokesperson for Google mentioned the corporate opposes the lawsuit, including that it’s “speculative and opportunistic”.
“Google works constructively with publishers throughout Europe. … (Our promoting instruments) adapt and evolve in partnership with those self same publishers.”
Google final yr mentioned it disagreed with EU antitrust prices towards its advert tech enterprise the place it’s concerned in each the buy-side in addition to the sell-side of the provision chain.
Publishers around the globe have in recent times lamented Large Tech’s growing dominance in promoting as their share of revenues fall. Google is probably the most dominant digital promoting platform on the planet, in keeping with analysts.
The group mentioned they filed the lawsuit in a Dutch court docket due to the nation’s popularity as a key jurisdiction for antitrust damages claims in Europe, and to keep away from a number of claims in several European nations.
Others within the group embrace Austria’s Krone, Belgian teams DPG Media and Mediahuis, Denmark’s TV2 Danmark A/S, Finland’s Sanoma, Poland’s Agora, Spain’s Prensa Iberica and Switzerland’s Ringier.
($1 = 0.9247 euro)
(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee, further reporting by Charlotte Van Campenhout and Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; modifying by Jason Neely and Jonathan Oatis)
