Dozens of Google’s competitors want EU tech law to be used in an antitrust case against the company. 

BRUSSELS – On Monday, more than 40 European companies that compete with Google’s shopping service asked EU antitrust regulators to use newly passed tech rules to make sure Alphabet’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Alphabet unit follows a 2017 EU order to let more companies compete on Google’s search page.

Five years ago, the European Commission fined Google $2.3 billion and told the company to stop favouring its shopping service.

After that, the company said it would treat its own shopping service the same as competitors when they bid in an auction for ads in the shopping box at the top of a search page.

But in a letter to the EU’s antitrust chief, Margrethe Vestager, 43 companies, including the British Kelkoo, the French LeGuide Group, the Swedish PriceRunner, and the German idealo, said that the proposal was not legal and that the ad auctions had not helped them.

In a letter seen by Reuters, the companies said, “The Commission needs to re-open space on general search results pages for the most relevant providers by removing Google’s Shopping Units, which don’t allow competition but lead to higher prices and less choice for consumers and an unfair transfer of profit margins from merchants and competing CSSs to Google.”

CSS stands for “Compare Shopping Services.”

They said that Google’s system broke Vestager’s new rules for limiting the power of tech giants, called the Digital Markets Act (DMA). These rules will go into effect in May of next year.

They said, “Google’s prominent embedding of shopping units is a clear violation of the DMA’s rule against self-preferencing.”

“Now that the new laws are clear, it is time to put words into action. The most important case that led to calls for the DMA needs to come to a good end, “companies from 20 countries in Europe said.”

($1 = 1.0289 euros)