Swedish court orders Google to pay about $1.5bn to PriceRunner in largest competition award

Sweden's Patent and Market Court has ordered Alphabet's Google to pay approximately $1.5 billion in antitrust damages to PriceRunner, the price comparison platform owned by fintech firm Klarna, according to the Conservative Research Group. The court found that Google broke competition law by systematically favouring its own shopping comparison service over rivals in search results. The European Commission condemned that conduct in a 2017 decision that carried a 2.42 billion euro fine.

The damages were broken down across three markets. Google was ordered to pay just over 1 billion Swedish kronor in Sweden, 675 million Danish kroner in Denmark, and 950 million British pounds in the United Kingdom. The total falls short of PriceRunner's original claim of 2.1 billion euro. Google has not publicly said whether it will appeal.

What the ruling actually decides

The case is a follow-on damages claim, which means it does not re-argue whether Google broke the law. Regulators settled that question. Instead, the Swedish court worked out how much PriceRunner lost as a result of conduct that had already been found illegal. The European Commission's 2017 decision found that Google demoted rival comparison shopping services while prominently displaying its own Google Shopping results, and the EU's highest court upheld that finding in 2024, per the Conservative Research Group. PriceRunner filed its lawsuit in 2022, arguing that Google's conduct had cost it traffic, visibility and revenue over more than a decade. The court largely accepted that theory of harm while trimming the amount. The ruling covers nearly fifteen years of documented harm across the three jurisdictions, the same account says. For Klarna, which acquired PriceRunner and had been looking to monetise the claim, the award is a substantial windfall at a time when the fintech sector has been under pressure.

The decision adds to a growing pile of European legal exposure for Google. The Conservative Research Group notes that the company faces a pipeline of follow-on claims from other comparison shopping services and businesses alleging similar treatment in other markets. Under EU law, companies found to have violated competition rules can be liable both to regulators and to private plaintiffs who can show harm. That is why cases like PriceRunner's can proceed years after the original regulatory action.

A US judge keeps a Microsoft claim alive

The Swedish award arrived a day after a separate antitrust development in the United States.

A California federal judge ruled on 28 September that ChatGPT users suing Microsoft can proceed with allegations that the company harmed competition by limiting OpenAI's choice of cloud providers, according to Guavy. The court rejected some of the plaintiffs' claims but refused to force arbitration on the cloud-related allegations. The case remains ongoing. These two decisions sit in the same legal family: private plaintiffs using earlier findings, or earlier conduct, to extract money or changes from platform companies. The Microsoft claim is at an earlier stage, so its practical significance is still unclear. The Swedish award is a final number, at least at this level, and a large one.

The money question behind the money question

The antitrust rulings land against a background of unusually large financial expectations for the technology sector. In a note published on 29 September, Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok pointed out that Wall Street analysts covering tech expect the sector's operating cash flow to more than double to roughly $2.4 trillion by 2028, an increase of over $1.2 trillion.

In other words, the tech silo is betting on a future in which demand for AI and tech services explodes, while the silos covering the companies that would pay for those services see a much more modest outlook. Both cannot be right at the same time.

Slok's conclusion is blunt: either tech's customers will generate a lot more cash than their analysts expect, or tech's cash flow forecasts are too optimistic. That is not an antitrust argument, but it matters to how the sector absorbs legal costs. A company that has promised investors a doubling of cash flow has less room to treat a $1.5 billion damages order as a rounding error, even if the sum is small against Google's balance sheet. The ruling also arrives amid a broader push to constrain platform power through private litigation rather than regulation alone. The Conservative Research Group argues that the Swedish decision could encourage similar claims in other jurisdictions, potentially multiplying Google's exposure as competitors seek compensation for years of alleged competitive harm. Whether that happens depends on how easily plaintiffs in other countries can attach their own losses to the 2017 finding.

Other pressure points this week

Google's European troubles are not the only regulatory thread running through the past few days. On 29 September, Consumer Reports published the results of privacy tests conducted by researchers at Northeastern University. The researchers found that vehicle data, including locations, vehicle identification numbers and other identifiers, was flowing to large technology companies including Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft. The study tested 21 vehicles and their companion apps inside a Faraday tent at Consumer Reports' Connecticut auto testing facility.

Separately, MIT Technology Review's 29 September newsletter flagged that OpenAI has scrapped a new AI model over safety concerns, with the company saying GPT-6.1 Astra "didn't quite meet the bar." The same newsletter noted that Anthropic's IPO filing warns AI could threaten humanity. That is not antitrust law either, but it is the political weather in which competition cases against large platforms are being decided. On the same day, the White House hosted technology executives for an AI luncheon. CNBC reported that President Donald Trump said he signed a "morally binding" artificial intelligence document with the assembled leaders, and that the administration is considering a 10-person committee to oversee the AI industry. House Speaker Mike Johnson described the agreement as voluntary. Trump also said he plans to name a new AI czar within three to four days.

Read together, the Swedish order and the California ruling suggest that courts, not legislatures or voluntary agreements, are currently the most active venue for changing what large technology platforms are allowed to do. The Swedish case shows what a damages claim can be worth when it is built on a finding regulators already made. The Microsoft case shows that such claims can survive early attempts to push them into arbitration. Neither resolves the underlying question of how much platform conduct is legal, but both move money and risk in the same direction: toward the companies.