Google’s Antitrust Woes and Google Shopping
Date
2019-08-28
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Abstract
In 2017, Google was fined 2.7 billion USD by the European Commission for its abuse of dominance when it promoted its Google Shopping service above rival comparison shopping services on Google’s results page. Comparison shopping services suffered from the conduct as they received less traffic as users selected Google’s prominently placed Google Shopping service. This thesis will question whether Google’s conduct was anticompetitive, or were they incorrectly fined for pro-competitive conduct? Additionally, Canada’s Competition Bureau and the United States’ Federal Trade Commission exonerated Google for the same activity in past years, so why would these agencies with similar goals and legislation come to different opinions regarding Google’s conduct? This thesis concludes that Google’s conduct is pro-competitive and that the United States and Canada were correct in their decision to cease the investigation. This thesis also identifies three reasons why the European Commission could have legally justified fining Google, even if it was not economically justified. The analysis conducted in this thesis could give guidance to other similar cases which Google is being investigated for, such as the investigation into Google Flights and Google Maps.
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Keywords
Google, Antitrust
Citation
White, A. J. (2019). Google’s Antitrust Woes and Google Shopping (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.