The British Couple Who Cost Google £2.1 Billion Has Spoken Out

A British couple who cost Google £2.1bn after taking it to court for competition abuse have spoken on the record for the first time - by speaking with Wired magazine.

In 2005, Adam and Shivaun Raff, from Crowthorne, Berkshire, left their jobs to set up the price comparison website 'Foundem' - designed to dredge the parts of the internet Google couldn't reach.

Within days of launching in 2006, the pair noticed that Google was unfairly penalising them, downgrading them for every search except Google's own name.

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The pair contacted Google repeatedly but made no progress - despite Foundem being named the UK's top comparison site by Channel 5's The Gadget Show in December 2008.

When the California tech company continued refusing to co-operate, the Raffs decided that they had had enough.

"It was clear that we'd have to go to war,' Mr Raff told Wired.

"That was the point where we said to ourselves, 'Fuck this. Google are bullies. This is wrong. We are going to win," his wife added.

After a year of complaints, Google finally 'whitelisted' Foundem - which boosted its traffic from the search engine by around 10,000 per cent.

Foundem

By this point, though, the Raffs had seen first-hand how Google was pushing its rivals down, boosting its own price comparison service to the top of its search results.

That led the Raffs to take their case to the European Commission for Competition in Brussels, in a case that later included esteemed companies like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Expedia and Deutsche Telecom.

On June 27, 2017, Margaret Vestager, the European Commissioner for Competition, ruled that Google had 'abused its market dominance', slapping the company with a £2.1billion fine - the biggest anti-trust penalty ever issued to a single company.

PA

Google are currently appealing the European Commission's judgment so it could still take years for the Raffs' civil lawsuit to be resolved.

Yet despite it taking 11 long years to get something close to a resolution, but the Raffs said that their fight was absolutely worth it.

"If you embark on something like this you can't really be a victory or despair personality, because you'd burn out," Mrs Raff said.

Mr Raff added: "It would have been wrong to back out. So we just did the right thing."

The Raffs' story is set to be included in Wired's upcoming March/April issue in full.

Topics: Google, News, EU, Technology

Chris Ogden

Chris Ogden is a journalist at LADbible. He graduated from the University of East Anglia with degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing before completing his NCTJ Diploma in Multimedia Journalism. Chris has previously written for the independent culture magazine The Skinny, among other publications.

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