A Swedish court has ordered Google to pay 14.3 billion kronor, about 1.3 billion euros, after ruling that the tech company illegally favored its own price comparison tool over PriceRunner, a rival service now owned by Klarna. The Patent and Market Court in Stockholm issued the judgment on Wednesday, closing out years of litigation over how Google displayed shopping results.
How the Court Reached 14.3 Billion Kronor
PriceRunner had asked for roughly 80 billion kronor, around 7.2 billion euros, arguing that Google's search practices had quietly buried its listings for more than a decade. The court agreed that PriceRunner suffered real harm from what it called Google's unlawful favoring of its own comparison shopping service, but it awarded only a fraction of the requested sum. Klarna, which valued the payout with interest at close to 1.97 billion dollars, or 1.7 billion euros, called the ruling a win even though the number fell far short of PriceRunner's original claim.
PriceRunner filed its damages case in Stockholm back in 2022, the same year Klarna bought the business and wove its price tracking technology into the Klarna app. The lawsuit leaned heavily on groundwork laid by European regulators years earlier.
A Case Built on the 2017 Brussels Ruling
The European Commission fined Google 2.42 billion euros in 2017 for abusing its dominant position in online search by giving its own shopping service an unfair boost over competitors. That decision held up under scrutiny, with the European Union's top court upholding it in 2024. Swedish judges leaned on those findings when weighing PriceRunner's claim, treating the Commission's conclusions as settled ground rather than something to relitigate from scratch.
Google has said it overhauled its search results in 2017 specifically to satisfy the Commission's demands, and the company has pushed back hard against the Swedish lawsuit since it began. Expect an appeal. Any payout can still be challenged in a higher court, and even if the ruling survives, taxes and revenue sharing arrangements with former PriceRunner shareholders and the litigation funder that backed the case will chip away at what Klarna actually collects.
Klarna's Market Reaction and What Comes Next
Investors liked the news regardless of the caveats. Klarna shares jumped 11.5 percent in premarket trading once the ruling landed. Dan Greaves, the company's head of communications and policy, framed the decision as a boost for fairer competition in how consumers compare prices and products online.
The ruling slots into a broader pattern of antitrust pressure on Google across Europe, where the original Google Shopping case remains a touchstone for regulators trying to curb the influence of dominant tech platforms. Whether Stockholm's judgment survives appeal will determine how much of a precedent it actually sets for other companies weighing similar damages claims against the same practices.