Brussels has fined Google $1bn, the first penalty issued under the EU's Digital Markets Act, for favouring its own services over rivals in its Google Play app store. On its own, that's a Big Tech antitrust story. But according to Reuters, it's also the spark for a much bigger wave: half a dozen lawyers and litigation funders now expect a fresh round of private lawsuits from comparison shopping sites, on top of roughly $9bn already being pursued through the courts.
The pattern will be familiar to anyone who's watched UK insurance aggregators duke it out with brokers for the last twenty years. Sites like Germany's Idealo, Sweden's PriceRunner, Italy's Moltiply and Britain's own Kelkoo and Foundem built entire businesses on ranking well in Google search results for product comparisons. When Google started promoting its own comparison tools instead, back in 2008, traffic to those rivals reportedly collapsed. It's taken until now, and a parade of court rulings, for any of them to see real money.
Insurance Business reported last month on the Stockholm court that ordered Google to pay Klarna's PriceRunner nearly $2bn after ruling the tech giant had rigged search results against it for 15 years, covering the UK market too. That case alone took the better part of two decades to produce a verdict, and Klarna's own lawyer admitted an appeal could drag on for years more before any money actually changes hands.
For a UK broking community that has spent years watching customers get funnelled toward MoneySuperMarket, GoCompare and Comparethemarket instead of picking up the phone, there's something almost satisfying about watching the comparison-site model reveal its own soft underbelly: total dependence on however Google feels like ranking things that day. Litigation financier LitFin's Matej Pardo, who is backing Amsterdam claims worth over $1bn, told Reuters that by the time these sites finally get paid, "they've already monopolised many markets" regardless, with Google treating the fines as just another line item in the cost of doing business.
Whether or not the aggregators collect on their claims, the wider business is shifting. As Insurance Business recently covered, even MoneySuperMarket is quietly moving away from pure comparison and into brokering customers directly, keeping them inside its own ecosystem rather than handing them off to insurers. Perhaps two decades of being at Google's mercy is enough to make anyone rethink the model.
