In open letter to EU competition chief, price comparison sites say Google has failed to comply with EU ruling that requires it to give equal treatment to others
Price comparison sites have accused Google of failing to comply with an EU ruling demanding it give other shopping services “equal treatment”.
Context & Ripple Effects
This open letter is the price comparison sector's escalation after years of stalemate: Google had denied Europe's antitrust accusations back in 2015, was fined €2.4B in 2017 for favoring its own shopping service, and responded with an equal-treatment remedy the signatories now say fails on its own terms. By taking their complaint directly to the EU competition chief rather than back through technical compliance channels, the sites are reframing the case from a display-format dispute into a test of whether EU remedies can actually restore lost traffic.
First-order effects
- Google faces renewed political pressure on the Commission to reopen or tighten the shopping remedy, with the signatories arguing the current equal-treatment setup still routes customers to Google's own service.
- The EU competition chief must publicly judge whether the remedy is working — a decision that sets the compliance bar for the rest of Google's European antitrust docket.
Second-order effects
- When the Commission later let rivals bid for top search placement, the commissioner conceded the auction-based fix had not delivered more traffic to competitors — validating the letter's core complaint and pushing enforcement toward structural rather than behavioral remedies.
- A 2020 study found Google still sends under 1% of shopping traffic to rival services despite the crackdown, giving the comparison sites evidentiary footing for damages claims that have since grown past €12B across dozens of firms.
Third-order effects
- The pattern — fine, behavioral remedy, continued self-preferencing, follow-on damages — has pushed the EU toward ex-ante rules: officials are now preparing formal charges against Google under the DMA over how it displays rival product results, targeting gatekeeper conduct before remedies are litigated.
- If the DMA track proves faster than the decade-long shopping saga, platform self-preferencing in Europe shifts from case-by-case antitrust to standing obligations, with the comparison sites' claims serving as the cautionary benchmark for other gatekeepers.
The trend: EU enforcement of platform self-preferencing is migrating from slow, remedial antitrust cases toward standing gatekeeper rules under the DMA, with the Google shopping saga as the template failure driving that shift.