Vestager sanctioned the world's most popular internet search engine in 2017 for favouring its own price-comparison shopping service to give it an unfair advantage against smaller European rivals.
The shopping case was the first of a trio of decisions that have seen Google rack up a total of 8.25 billion euros in EU antitrust fines in the last decade. Vestager subsequently took on Amazon, Apple, and Facebook, where investigations are still ongoing.
"The General Court largely dismisses Google's action against the decision of the Commission finding that Google abused its dominant position by favouring its own comparison-shopping service over competing comparison shopping services," the Court said.
Google can appeal to the EU Court of Justice Europe's top court, on points of law.
In Europe, the courts have sometimes ruled against regulators. Last year, the General Court ruled against an order to require Apple to pay 13 billion euros in unpaid taxes. Amazon also successfully appealed another order to repay taxes.
However this time the court sided with regulators who in 2017 said the internet giant used its dominance as a search engine to unfairly help its own internet shopping service over those of smaller rivals.
“By favouring its own comparison shopping service on its general results pages through more favourable display and positioning, while relegating the results from competing comparison services in those pages by means of ranking algorithms, Google departed from competition on the merits,” the court said.
Google said it was reviewing the decision, but added that it has already made a number of changes to its shopping product to comply with the 2017 decision.
“Shopping ads have always helped people find the products they are looking for quickly and easily, and helped merchants to reach potential customers,” the company said in a statement.
“Our approach has worked successfully for more than three years, generating billions of clicks for more than 700 comparison shopping services.”
The €2.4 billion fine was a record at the time, before being surpassed in 2018, when the commission fined Google €4.34 billion for illegally using the Android operating system to bolster the usage of its search engine and other services on mobile devices.
In 2019, Vestager’s office fined Google €1.49 billion for imposing unfair terms on companies that used its search bar on their websites in Europe.
The EU is currently drafting the Digital Markets Act which will be adopted next year and would give European regulators new powers to intervene in the digital economy, including blocking companies like Google and Apple from giving their services preferential treatment over rivals.
Violating the new rules would result in fines of up to 10 percent of a company’s annual revenue.