Google has been ordered to pay nearly $2 billion to Klarna after a Stockholm court ruled the tech giant had illegally favoured its own price comparison service over rivals in search results.
The Stockholm Patent and Market Court ruled earlier today that Google had illegally promoted its own comparison shopping tool over Klarna's PriceRunner across the UK, Swedish and Danish markets between 2008 and 2023. The $1.97 billion award, including nearly $500 million in accrued interest, is the largest ever in a Swedish antitrust case, though well short of the $8 billion Klarna had originally sought.
"PriceRunner is considered to have suffered damage as a result of Google having illegally favoured its price comparison service for many years," the court said. Google said it "doesn't agree with the court's decision" and is reviewing its legal options.
Klarna, which acquired PriceRunner in 2022 to build out its shopping and payments ambitions, listed on the New York Stock Exchange last September. Its shares rose 10% in pre-market trading.
UK insurance comparison sites - GoCompare, MoneySuperMarket, Compare the Market and Confused.com - built their dominant market positions on the same Google search traffic at the centre of the PriceRunner case. Over 40% of UK consumers now buy car insurance through a comparison site. comparethemarket.com leads UK insurance websites with approximately 6.15% share of voice across insurance search terms, followed by GoCompare at 4.36% and MoneySuperMarket at 1.86%, according to Pi Datametrics.
Wednesday's ruling establishes that Google's approach to surfacing its own comparison tools ahead of competitors was illegal - and that the damages from doing so run into billions across 15 years.
After the EU levied a €2.42 billion fine against Google in 2017 for the same behaviour, a wave of European price-comparison companies sued for damages. Several cases remain pending across Europe. The PriceRunner case covers the UK market between 2008 and 2023 - the same period in which the major UK aggregators built their positions. Whether any UK comparison sites pursue their own claims is the question competition lawyers will now be watching.
Comparison sites have been a source of tension in the insurance distribution market since they emerged in the UK in the early 2000s - compressing margins on personal lines products and routing customers around brokers who argue those same products need specialist advice. As Insurance Business has reported, that tension is now sharpening again as MoneySuperMarket launches AI-powered comparison tools inside ChatGPT.
Wednesday's ruling will not shrink the comparison site market. But it confirms that the growth of those platforms was partly built on a search environment Google was tilting in its own favour. For brokers who spent 20 years competing against aggregators backed by that advantage, it is a notable finding.
Klarna put it in consumer terms: "This ruling supports a healthier, more competitive market for the way people compare products and services." Competition lawyers across Europe are already working out what to do with it.
