London — Google lost its final legal challenge on Tuesday against a European Union penalty for giving its own shopping recommendations an illegal advantage over rivals in search results, ending a long-running antitrust case that came with a whopping fine. 

The European Union’s Court of Justice upheld a lower court’s decision, rejecting the company’s appeal against the $2.7 billion penalty from the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s top antitrust enforcer. 

“By today’s judgment, the Court of Justice dismisses the appeal and thus upholds the judgment of the General Court,” the court said in a press release summarizing its decision. 

The commission’s punished the Silicon Valley giant in 2017 for unfairly directing visitors to its own Google Shopping service to the detriment of competitors. It was one of three multibillion-dollar fines that the commission imposed on Google in the previous decade as Brussels started ramping up its crackdown on the tech industry. 

“We are disappointed with the decision of the Court, which relates to a very specific set of facts,” Google said in a brief statement. 

The company said it made changes in 2017 to comply with the commission’s decision requiring it to treat competitors equally. It started holding auctions for shopping search listings that it would bid for alongside other comparison shopping services. 

“Our approach has worked successfully for more than seven years, generating billions of clicks for more than 800 comparison shopping services,” Google said. 

At the same time, the company appealed the decision to the courts. But the EU General Court, the tribunal’s lower section, rejected its challenge in 2021 and the Court of Justice’s adviser later recommended rejecting the appeal. 

European consumer group BEUC hailed the court’s decision, saying it shows how the bloc’s competition law “remains highly relevant” in digital markets. 

“Google harmed millions of European consumers by ensuring that rival comparison shopping services were virtually invisible,” director general Agustín Reyna said. “Google’s illegal practices prevented consumers from accessing potentially cheaper prices and useful product information from rival comparison shopping services on all sorts of products, from clothes to washing machines.” 
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beijing — Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday urged visiting Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to play a “constructive role” in improving strained ties between Bejing and the European Union. 

Sanchez for his part said he hoped the EU could avoid a trade war with China, even as Brussels weighs imposing tariffs on China-manufactured electric vehicles.

In their meeting, Xi also talked up deepening commercial ties between China and Spain in sectors such as artificial intelligence, digital economy, new energy and other high-tech fields.

The Chinese leader said Beijing wanted to work with Brussels to further develop a China-EU relationship where the two maintain their independence and autonomy but also succeed together and bring benefit to the world, a Chinese readout said. 

“It is hoped Spain will continue to play a constructive role in this regard,” Xi added. 

Sanchez responded: “Spain wants to work constructively so that relations between the two are closer, richer and more balanced.” 

Beijing in June said that frictions with the EU over its plans to impose tariffs of up to 36.3% on its electric vehicles (EVs) could trigger a trade conflict, days after China announced a retaliatory anti-dumping probe into European pork imports. 

China in August then raised the stakes by opening an investigation into the bloc’s dairy subsidies. 

Prior to meeting Xi, Sanchez said at business events that Spain would work for a negotiated consensus to the EV dispute within the World Trade Organization and that a “trade war would benefit no one,” a government source said.  

Spain in 2023 exported $1.5 billion worth of the pork products that China will investigate, Chinese customs data showed, dwarfing the outbound shipments from the Netherlands and Denmark, which rank second and third. 

Spain also sold just under $50 million worth of targeted dairy products to China last year. 

But in a promising sign for Spain’s pork producers, a separate source with direct access to Xi’s meeting with Sanchez said the two leaders had “found harmony and understanding,” when asked about possible curbs on Spain’s outbound pork shipments. 

“The meeting went extremely well,” the source said, adding that both defended their positions while seeking agreements. 

Fair trade 

“We want to build bridges together to defend a trade order that’s fair,” Sanchez told China’s second-ranking official, Premier Li Qiang, before meeting Xi.  

Spain had a trade deficit of 17.27 billion euros ($19.07 billion) in the first half of this year, according to government statistics.  

Sanchez will also want reassurance that China will not strike back at Brussels by raising its own tariffs on imported large-engined gasoline-powered vehicles, as state Chinese media have suggested it might.  

Spain could also be impacted by the Chinese EV tariffs. Last week SEAT-CUPRA’s CEO said that an electric vehicle made in China and designed in Spain by CUPRA, which is owned by Germany’s Volkswagen, would be “wiped out” if the European Commission followed through with planned import tariffs on Chinese-made vehicles.  

Sanchez on Tuesday is expected to meet representatives of SAIC Motor, one of the Chinese automakers most affected by the EU tariffs, and sign a Memorandum of Understanding with greentech company Envision, which is building an EV battery plant in Spain. 

“In this increasingly geopolitical and economic context, as you have pointed out, we must work together to resolve differences through negotiation,” Sanchez told Xi. 

In an advisory vote in July, Spain, France and Italy supported the European Commission’s proposal to adopt additional duties on Chinese-made EVs on top of the bloc’s standard 10% tariff.  

But Beijing has been urging the EU’s member states to reject the curbs at a final vote on it in October.  

The tariffs would be implemented in addition to the EU’s standard 10% import tariff unless a qualified majority of 15 EU members representing 65% of the EU population vote against them.
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A lack of opportunities has resulted in underrepresentation of Black designers, stylists and other creatives in the fashion industry. It’s also created a new wave of Black entrepreneurs who are passing on lessons of the business. Tina Trinh reports. (Camera and Produced by: Tina Trinh)
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ALEXANDRIA, Va. — One month after a judge declared Google’s search engine an illegal monopoly, the tech giant faces another antitrust lawsuit that threatens to break up the company, this time over its advertising technology.

The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintains a monopoly over the technology that matches online publishers to advertisers. Dominance over the software on both the buy side and the sell side of the transaction enables Google to keep as much as 36 cents on the dollar when it brokers sales between publishers and advertisers, the government contends in court papers.

Google says the government’s case is based on an internet of yesteryear, when desktop computers ruled and internet users carefully typed precise World Wide Web addresses into URL fields. Advertisers now are more likely to turn to social media companies like TikTok or streaming TV services like Peacock to reach audiences.

In recent years, Google Networks, the division of the Mountain View, California-based tech giant that includes such services as AdSense and Google Ad Manager that are at the heart of the case, actually have seen declining revenue, from $31.7 billion in 2021 to $31.3 billion in 2023, according to the company’s annual reports.

The trial over the alleged ad tech monopoly begins Monday in Alexandria, Virginia. It initially was going to be a jury trial, but Google maneuvered to force a bench trial, writing a check to the federal government for more than $2 million to moot the only claim brought by the government that required a jury.

The case will now be decided by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who was appointed to the bench by former President Bill Clinton and is best known for high-profile terrorism trials including Sept. 11 defendant Zacarias Moussaoui. Brinkema, though, also has experience with highly technical civil trials, working in a courthouse that sees an outsize number of patent infringement cases.

The Virginia case comes on the heels of a major defeat for Google over its search engine. which generates the majority of the company’s $307 billion in annual revenue. A judge in the District of Columbia declared the search engine a monopoly, maintained in part by tens of billions of dollars Google pays each year to companies like Apple to lock in Google as the default search engine presented to consumers when they buy iPhones and other gadgets.

In that case, the judge has not yet imposed any remedies. The government hasn’t offered its proposed sanctions, though there could be close scrutiny over whether Google should be allowed to continue to make exclusivity deals that ensure its search engine is consumers’ default option.

Peter Cohan, a professor of management practice at Babson College, said the Virginia case could potentially be more harmful to Google because the obvious remedy would be requiring it to sell off parts of its ad tech business that generate billions of dollars in annual revenue.

“Divestitures are definitely a possible remedy for this second case,” Cohan said “It could be potentially more significant than initially meets the eye.”

In the Virginia trial, the government’s witnesses are expected to include executives from newspaper publishers including The New York Times Co. and Gannett, and online news sites that the government contends have faced particular harm from Google’s practices.

“Google extracted extraordinary fees at the expense of the website publishers who make the open internet vibrant and valuable,” government lawyers wrote in court papers. “As publishers generate less money from selling their advertising inventory, publishers are pushed to put more ads on their websites, to put more content behind costly paywalls, or to cease business altogether.”

Google disputes that it charges excessive fees compared to its competitors. The company also asserts the integration of its technology on the buy side, sell side and in the middle assures ads and web pages load quickly and enhance security. And it says customers have options to work with outside ad exchanges.

Google says the government’s case is improperly focused on display ads and banner ads that load on web pages accessed through a desktop computer and fails to take into account consumers’ migration to mobile apps and the boom in ads placed on social media sites over the last 15 years.

The government’s case “focuses on a limited type of advertising viewed on a narrow subset of websites when user attention migrated elsewhere years ago,” Google’s lawyers write in a pretrial filing. “The last year users spent more time accessing websites on the ‘open web,’ rather than on social media, videos, or apps, was 2012.”

The trial, which is expected to last several weeks, is taking place in a courthouse that rigidly adheres to traditional practices, including a resistance to technology in the courtroom. Cellphones are banned from the courthouse, to the chagrin of a tech press corps accustomed at the District of Columbia trial to tweeting out live updates as they happen.

Even the lawyers, and there are many on both sides, are limited in their technology. At a pretrial hearing Wednesday, Google’s lawyers made a plea to be allowed more than the two computers each side is permitted to have in the courtroom during trial. Brinkema rejected it.

“This is an old-fashioned courtroom,” she said.
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Athens — Greece plans to impose a 20-euro ($22) levy on cruise ship visitors to the islands of Santorini and Mykonos during the peak summer season, in a bid to avert overtourism, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said Sunday. 

Greece relies heavily on tourism, the main driver of the country’s economy which is still recovering from a decadelong crisis that wiped out a fourth of its output. 

But some of its most popular destinations, including Santorini, an idyllic island of quaint villages and pristine beaches with 20,000 permanent residents, risk being ruined by mass tourism. 

Speaking at a news conference a day after outlining his main economic policies for 2025, Mitsotakis clarified that excessive tourism was only a problem in a few destinations. 

“Greece does not have a structural overtourism problem… Some of its destinations have a significant issue during certain weeks or months of the year, which we need to deal with,” he said. 

“Cruise shipping has burdened Santorini and Mykonos, and this is why we are proceeding with interventions,” he added, announcing the levy. 

Greek tourism revenues stood at about 20 billion euros ($22 billion) in 2023 on the back of nearly 31 million tourist arrivals. 

In Santorini, protesters have called for curbs on tourism, as in other popular holiday destinations in Europe, including Venice and Barcelona. 

Part of the revenues from the cruise shipping tax will be returned to local communities to be invested in infrastructure, Mitsotakis said. 

The government also plans to regulate the number of cruise ships that arrive simultaneously at certain destinations, while rules to protect the environment and tackle water shortages must also be imposed on islands, he said. 

Greece also wants to increase a tax on short-term rentals and ban new licenses for such rentals in central Athens to increase the housing stock for permanent residents, Mitsotakis said Saturday. 

The government will provide more details on some of the measures Monday.
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FRANKFURT, Germany — Volkswagen is considering closing some factories in its home country for the first time in the German automaker’s 87-year history, saying it otherwise won’t meet the cost-cutting goals it needs to remain competitive.

CEO Oliver Blume also told employees Wednesday that the company must end a three-decade-old job protection pledge that would have prohibited layoffs through 2029.

The statements have stirred outrage among worker representatives and concern among German politicians.

Here are some things to know about the difficulties at one of the world’s best-known auto brands:

What is Volkswagen proposing and why?

Management says the company’s core brand that carries the company’s name needs to achieve 10 billion euros in cost savings by 2026. It recently became clear the Volkswagen Passenger Car division was not on track to do that after relying on retirements and voluntary buyouts to reduce the workforce in Germany.

With Europe’s car market smaller than before the coronavirus pandemic, Volkswagen says it now has more factory capacity than it needs — and carrying underused assembly lines is expensive.

Chief Financial Officer Arno Antlitz explained it like this to 25,000 workers who gathered at the company’s Wolfsburg home base: Europeans are buying around 2 million cars per year fewer than they did before the pandemic in 2019, when sales reached 15.7 million.

Since Volkswagen has roughly a quarter of the European market, that means “we are short of 500,000 cars, the equivalent of around two plants,” Antlitz told the workers.

“And that has nothing to do with our products or poor sales performance. The market simply is no longer there,” he said.

Does Volkswagen make money?

The Volkswagen Group, whose 10 brands include SEAT, Skoda, CUPRA and commercial vehicles, turned an operating profit of 10.1 billion euros ($11.2 billion) in the first half of this year, down 11% from last year’s first-half figure.

Higher costs outweighed a modest 1.6% increase in sales, which reached 158.8 billion euros but were held down by sluggish demand. Blume called it “a solid performance” in a “demanding environment.” Volkswagen’s luxury brands, which include Porsche, Audi and Lamborghini, are selling better than VW models.

So why is Volkswagen struggling?

The discussion about reducing costs focuses on the core brand and its workers in Germany. Volkswagen’s passenger car division recorded a 68% earnings drop in the second quarter, and its profit margin was a bare 0.9%, down from 4% in the first quarter.

One reason is the division took the bulk of the 1 billion euros that went to job buyouts and other restructuring costs. But growing costs, including for higher wages, and sluggish sales of the company’s line of electric vehicles are a deeper problem. On top of that, new, competitively priced competitors from China are increasing their share of the European market.

Volkswagen must sell more electric cars to meet ever-lower European Union emission limits that take effect starting next year. Yet the company is seeing lower profit margins from those vehicles due to high battery costs and weaker demand for EVs in Europe due to the withdrawal of consumer subsidies and the slow rollout of public charging stations.

Meanwhile, VW’s electric vehicles also face stiff competition in China from models made by local companies.

The world’s automakers are in a battle for the future, spending billions to pivot to lower-emission electric cars in a race to come up with vehicles that are competitive on price and have enough range to persuade buyers to switch. China has dozens of carmakers making electric cars more cheaply than their European equivalents. Increasingly, those cars are being sold in Europe.

Profits have also declined at Germany’s BMW and Mercedes-Benz thanks to the same pressures.

Why are VW’s proposed factory and job cuts a big deal in Germany?

Volkswagen has 10 assembly and parts plants in Germany, where 120,000 of its 684,000 workers worldwide are based. As Europe’s largest carmaker, the company is a symbol of the country’s consumer prosperity and economic growth after World War II.

It has never closed a German factory before. VW last closed a plant in 1988 in Westmoreland, Pennsylvania; its Audi division is in discussions about closing an underutilized plant in Belgium.

Far-right parties fueled by popular disenchantment with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s quarreling, three-party coalition government scored major gains in Sept. 1 elections in Thueringia and Saxony states, located in the former communist East Germany. Nationwide polls show the government’s approval rating at a low point. Plant closings are the last thing the Scholz government needs.

The chancellor spoke with VW management and workers after the possible plant closings became known but was careful to stress that the decision is a matter for the company and its workers.

Why hasn’t Volkswagen already made the cost cuts management wants?

Employee representatives have a lot of clout at Volkswagen. They hold half the seats on the board of directors. The state government, which is a part-owner of the company, also has two board seats — together with the employee representatives a majority — and 20% of the voting rights at the company. Lower Saxony Gov. Stephan Weil has said the company needs to address its costs but should avoid plant closings.

That means management will have to negotiate — a process that will take months.

What does the employee side say?

Managers at the employee assembly faced several minutes of boos, whistles and tooting horns before they could start their presentation on the potential explanation. “We are Volkswagen, you are not,” workers chanted.

Daniela Cavallo, who chairs the company works council representing employees, said the council “won’t go along with plant closings.” Reducing labor costs won’t turn around Volkswagen’s financial situation, she argued.

“Volkswagen’s problem is upper management isn’t doing its job,” Cavallo said. “There are many other areas where the company is responsible… We have to have competitive products; we don’t have the entry-level models in electric cars.”
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Johannesburg — After pledging $51 billion in financial support for Africa over the next three years and positioning China as a fellow developing country in contrast to the West’s colonialist past, President Xi Jinping told dozens of African leaders gathered in Beijing this week that “the China-Africa relationship is now at its best in history.”

This year’s Forum on Africa-China Cooperation, held every three years, was the first since the pandemic and China’s own economic slowdown. It comes amid growing geopolitical rivalry between Beijing and the West, and Xi was blunt in his assessment of the latter’s influence on the continent.

“Modernization is an inalienable right of all countries,” he said in his opening speech to more than 50 African leaders. “But the Western approach to it has inflicted immense sufferings on developing countries.”

Lucas Engel, an analyst with the Global China Initiative at Boston University, said China is reacting to increased competition in the region.

“Xi’s reminder of the ‘immense suffering’ inflicted on Africa by the West in his keynote speech this year is a sharper rebuke of Africa’s Western partners than we’ve seen in the past,” he told VOA. “It is likely that China is feeling the heat as Western partners ramp up cooperation with Africa.”

The theme of FOCAC 2024 was “joining hands to promote modernization,” and analysts told VOA beforehand they expected China to focus on green technology and the green energy transition, agricultural modernization and trade, and education and training.

The money announced was an increase on the $40 billion pledged at the last FOCAC, in 2021, but still fell short of previous pledges, such as the $60 billion earmarked for Africa in 2018 and 2015.

For some time, China has been seen to be moving away from the massive infrastructure projects of the early years of Xi’s trademark Belt and Road Initiative and toward what it has dubbed “small is beautiful projects.”

Some of the announcements made at FOCAC, however, surprised analysts by bucking that trend.

Xi announced China would be undertaking a $1 billion upgrade of the TAZARA railway, which will link mineral-rich, landlocked Zambia with Tanzania’s coast. He signed an agreement with the presidents of those two countries on Wednesday.

“There was already a sense that infrastructure would be one of those asks that would not be entertained by the Chinese side, so I think that has come as a bit of a surprise,” Paul Nantulya, a research associate with the Africa Center for Strategic Studies in Washington, told VOA.

“I think African countries were also quite concerned about infrastructure financing. … Now it seems like the Chinese side may have finally backed down,” said Nantulya, who was in Beijing for FOCAC. “That would indicate that China does not want to be locked out of the infrastructure game, given what the U.S. is doing with the Lobito Corridor.”

Nantulya was referring to the G7-backed strategic economic corridor that Washington says is designed to create jobs and enhance export potential for resource-rich Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia. As the first big infrastructure project in Africa the U.S. has undertaken in a generation, Washington recently announced it could extend the railway to Tanzania and on to the Indian Ocean.

“China’s offer to refurbish the TAZARA railway connecting copper-rich Zambia with Tanzania on Africa’s eastern coast appears to be a direct answer to the Western-led Lobito Corridor,” said Engel of Boston University.

Did African leaders get what they wanted?

China was not the only country with an agenda at FOCAC, as African leaders also laid out their priorities for relations with their largest trading partner.

For South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who leads the continent’s most developed economy, the primary aim was to reduce a long-standing trade imbalance and to get China to import more agricultural products. He also wants to see more value-added exports made in South Africa.

Ramaphosa embarked on a state visit to China ahead of FOCAC and made several announcements, including that South Africa would sign up for China’s Beidou satellite navigation system and inviting Chinese electric vehicle company BYD to use South Africa as a manufacturing hub.

Xi said China would in turn expand market access to African agricultural products and exempt 33 countries from import tariffs. He also announced that China would support 60,000 vocational training opportunities for Africans.

Nantulya said there seemed to be a lot of attention to detail regarding this year’s announcements.

“What that tells me is that the Chinese side has been responding to the African side,” he said. “You know, the African delegates are very mindful of the fact that one of the big criticisms of FOCAC is that it’s very high on pledges and very low on actual concrete tasks.”

Yunnan Chen, a researcher at London-based research group ODI, told VOA the pledged areas of cooperation spanned almost every sector.

“I think what’s interesting to note about them is this very striking emphasis on areas of technological cooperation — in industry, in agriculture, in science and technology,” she said.

“There’s a lot of emphasis on training and initiatives that would support knowledge transfer from China to African parties, and I think this is something that’s been very much an African demand for many years,” she added.

“Even though we have seen a decline in Chinese financing in Africa and we know that China is experiencing a lot of domestic financial troubles, there’s still a very clear and very emphatic political commitment,” she said.

Aside from Ramaphosa’s trade demands, other African leaders who held bilateral meetings with Xi had specific areas of concern.

Kenyan President William Ruto had infrastructure at the top of his list, asking that Beijing fund an extension of Kenya’s Chinese-built Standard Gauge Railway. It marked a sharp change from Ruto’s campaign rhetoric, in which he criticized his predecessor’s policy of taking Chinese loans.

Ruto made the request even though Kenya is heavily in debt to Western financial institutions such as the IMF and lenders such as China and has been experiencing violent anti-government protests.

Other key areas of cooperation announced at the conclusion of FOCAC included the military and security sectors, with Beijing vowing to allocate some $140 million in military assistance grants alongside training programs for thousands of military personnel from across the continent.

Green energy was also a focus, with Xi announcing China would launch 30 new clean energy projects on the continent.
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