Klarna: Swedish court delays Google ruling

A Swedish court was supposed to rule on April 15 in PriceRunner’s damages case against Google, and it has now pushed that date to June 10 at 11:00 Central European Time after saying it needed more time to finalize the judgment. Klarna, which owns PriceRunner, disclosed the delay on April 10. (businesswire.com) This is not a new lawsuit. PriceRunner sued Google in Stockholm in February 2022 and said it was seeking about 2.1 billion euros, or roughly 22 billion Swedish kronor at the time. (pricerunner.com) (cnbc.com) PriceRunner is a comparison shopping site, which means it tries to send shoppers to merchants by showing who sells the same product for less. Its case says Google used its search engine like a store owner putting its own products in the front window and everyone else on the bottom shelf. (cnbc.com) (eur-lex.europa.eu) The legal backbone of the claim is a June 27, 2017 European Commission decision that found Google abused a dominant position in 13 European Economic Area countries by favoring its own comparison shopping service in search results. The Commission fined Google 2.42 billion euros in that case. (eur-lex.europa.eu) (cliffordchance.com) Google spent years appealing that decision, which is one reason the damages case moved slowly. On September 10, 2024, the Court of Justice of the European Union upheld the 2.4 billion euro fine, leaving the finding against Google in place. (cliffordchance.com) (scl.org) That did not automatically hand PriceRunner a check. A damages court still has to decide how much harm PriceRunner actually suffered, over what years, and whether Google owes the full amount claimed. (businesswire.com) (pricerunner.com) Klarna bought PriceRunner in 2022, so the case now sits inside a company that public investors can trade under the ticker KLAR in New York. That is why a Swedish court scheduling notice turned into investor news within hours. (cnbc.com) (businesswire.com) The court did not say the delay signals a win or a loss for either side. It said only that “additional time is needed to finalize the judgment,” and Klarna added that the outcome remains uncertain on both liability and the size of any damages. (businesswire.com) So the next real date is June 10, 2026, not April 15. Until then, one of Europe’s biggest follow-on antitrust damages cases against Google stays in limbo, with the central question unchanged since 2022: how much money, if any, a rival shopping site can recover after regulators already proved Google broke the rules. (businesswire.com) (eur-lex.europa.eu)