Google Under Fire As 32 Media Groups Unite To Sue The Company For Incurring Losses Worth Billions

Things aren’t looking too great for search giant Google who just was cornered by 32 different media groups. The company has been sued for $2.27 billion USD (or 2.1 billion Euro) after the groups claimed the firm’s digital ad practices led to serious financial losses.

The publishers in question are located in several different nations in the EU including the likes of Belgium, Denmark, Austria, Norway, Sweden, Hungary, and the Netherlands.

The media houses issued a joint statement that shed light on how they’ve gone through huge losses, thanks to the least competitive market that arose thanks to the search engine giant’s mishandling of the matter.

They also mentioned how the tech giant abused its leading position in the market today, and these media firms would end up getting bigger revenues thanks to ads and would pay much lower amounts for services like advertising.

Such funds were reinvested in bettering the whole EU landscape.

Now, Google says that it’s not aware of how such a matter arose in the first place and therefore is bidding the allegations as false and one used to defame the firm. They have even gone as far as to dub it as a speculative issue and released a statement on this front.

Google stated how it’s always worked most constructively with any EU publisher and given rise to a whole lot of advertising tools. Most of those are linked to adtech competitors and assist so many web pages and platforms in funding content seen online. This enables firms of various sizes to reach out to new clients effectively.

The services in question are adapting and evolving with time with the same lot of publishers. Therefore, such a legal case is very opportunistic they mentioned and they hope to oppose that vigorously, depending on other facts.

Let’s not forget the crucial timing of this matter and how the case follows up with competition attained from the French who continue to roll out fines worth $238 million regarding Google’s ad tech business and the charges brought forward by the EC in 2023. These were used as references in the claims made by the media groups.

As per reports from a court in the Netherlands, the group opted to sue the company inside a court belonging to the Dutch as the nation is famous for handling such claims inside Europe. In this way, the result would prevent dealing with a lot of claims linked to various EU nations.

Image: Digital Information World - AIgen

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World