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Google has been on the radar of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition for some time. Over the last few years, the European Commission has launched competition law investigations into three Google services: Google Shopping, Android and AdSense. In June 2017, the Commission released its decision in the Google Shopping case. The Commission imposed a record fine of €2.42 billion on Google for violating EU antitrust rules. According to the Commission, Google abused its market dominance as a search engine by giving an ‘illegal advantage’ to its own advertisers through its comparison shopping service. The Google Shopping decision can be understood to a significant degree by reference to conscious and unconscious biases. These biases, of course, are not overt – in administrative decision-making, decision-makers have to apply the law and support their decisions with reasons. Legal reasoning, however, provides an opportunity to test the plausibility of hypothesized bias: if the reasoning is strong, persuasive and objective, bias is either irrelevant (that is, it has not influenced the decision) or unlikely. If reasoning is weak, unpersuasive, or subjective, bias may have played a role. As this article demonstrates, based on careful analysis of the Commission’s reasoning in the Google Shopping case, the hypothesis of possible bias is confirmed.
