Swedish Court Orders Google to Pay Klarna $1.97 Billion in Price-Comparison Antitrust Case

A Stockholm court has ordered Google to pay Klarna $1.97 billion in damages, ruling in favor of Klarna's price-comparison unit PriceRunner in an antitrust case filed in 2022. The case centered on allegations that Google systematically favored its own Shopping price-comparison service in search results while suppressing rivals — a practice that disadvantaged PriceRunner and other competing services across Europe.

The Patent and Market Court in Stockholm ruled for PriceRunner on part of its claim while dismissing other portions, meaning the $1.97 billion award reflects a partial victory. Klarna's shares jumped 5% on the news, signaling investor confidence that the ruling validates PriceRunner's competitive position. Google, for its part, said it disagrees with the decision and is evaluating legal options, pointing to changes it made to its Shopping ads product in 2017 that it claims benefited European comparison-shopping services.

The ruling is the latest in a string of antitrust blows to Google's shopping and search dominance in Europe. In 2024, the EU's top court upheld a $2.67 billion fine against Google for the same category of behavior — abusing its search engine dominance to promote its own comparison-shopping tool while demoting competitors. That EU ruling opened the floodgates: a wave of European price-comparison services subsequently filed their own lawsuits against Google, with several cases still pending across the continent.

The cumulative financial and legal exposure for Google in this arena is now substantial, with the Stockholm award and the earlier EU fine alone totaling nearly $4.6 billion. The outcome also reinforces Europe's aggressive posture on platform self-preferencing, a regulatory battleground that continues to intensify.