A UK couple after winning a 15-year-long legal battle against Google, facing a record 2.4 billion pound fine for market abuse. 

The founders of the price comparison website ‘foundem’ Shivaun and Adam Raff, launched their business in 2006. Soon after going live, they noticed a drop in their website visibility on Google search for key terms such as price ‘comparison’ and ‘shopping.’

This unexpected drop was due to a search penalty from the tech giant's automated spam filters, ranking their site much lower, affecting the website’s ability to generate revenue as users couldn’t access the site through Google search. 

"We were monitoring our pages and how they were ranking, and then we saw them all plummet almost immediately," Mr. Adam told the BBC. 

Initially, they assumed it was an error, "We just assumed that we had to escalate to the right place and it would be overturned," Ms. Shivaun clarified. Despite numerous attempts two years later, Google failed to remove the penalty. Other search engines ranked Foundem properly, but its traffic kept declining.

After they went to the European Commission, their case gained momentum in 2010. Google was found to have unjustly marketed its own shopping service over rivals like Foundem after a protracted antitrust probe. In 2017, the Commission fined Google 2.4 billion pounds after concluding that the company had abused its market dominance.

Google filed an appeal, which led to seven years of court cases. Google's appeals were denied by the European Court of Justice, which upheld the penalties in 2024.

Google continues to adhere to the fine-addressing policies that were terminated in 2017. "For over seven years, the modifications we made in 2017 to comply with the European Commission's Shopping decision have worked successfully, generating billions of clicks for more than 800 comparison shopping services," a spokeswoman told the reporters.

"We've both been brought up maybe under the delusion that we can make a difference, and we really don't like bullies," said Ms Shivaun.

The Raffs are pursuing a civil damages claim against Google, set for trial in 2026, though Foundem was forced to close in 2016. "If we had known it would take this long, we might have thought twice," said Mr Adam, after a 15-year battle.