We took on Google and forced them to pay £2 billion

“Google has basically disappeared from the Internet.”

Launch days. It’s exciting and terrifying in equal measure for many startup founders, but it’s not much worse than what Shevonne Ruff and her husband, Adam, experienced.

It was June 2006, and the couple’s pioneering price comparison site Foundem — a site to which they had sacrificed well-paying jobs and built from scratch — was fully up and running.

They didn’t know it at the time, but that day, and the next, marked the beginning of the end for their company.

Foundem has been hit with a Google search penalty, due to one of the search engine’s automatic spam filters. It pushed the website down search results listings for related queries like “price comparison” and “comparison shopping.”

That meant the couple’s site, which had been charging fees when customers clicked on their product listings to get to other websites, struggled to make any money.

“We were monitoring our pages and how they were ranking, and then we saw them all go down almost immediately,” says Adam.

Although Foundem’s launch day didn’t go as planned, it would lead to the start of something else — a 15-year legal battle that culminated in that A record fine of 2.4 billion euros (2 billion pounds sterling) was imposed on Google, which was deemed to have abused its market dominance.

The case has been hailed as a landmark moment in global regulation of big technology companies.

Google spent seven years fighting that ruling, issued in June 2017, but in September this year, Europe’s highest court – the European Court of Justice – rejected its appeals.

Speaking to Radio 4’s The Bottom Line In their first interview since the final ruling, Shevon and Adam explained that they initially thought their website’s rocky start was just a mistake.

“We initially thought this was collateral damage, that we were being wrongly detected as spam,” says Shevon, 55. “We just assumed we had to escalate to the right place and the order would be cancelled.”

Adam, 58 years old, adds: “If you are denied passage, you have no work.”

The couple sent numerous requests to Google to lift the restrictions, but more than two years later, nothing has changed, and they said they have not received any response.

Meanwhile, their website was “ranking quite organically” on other search engines, but that didn’t really matter, according to Shevon, since “everyone uses Google.”

The pair later discovered that theirs wasn’t the only site put at a disadvantage by Google: By the time the tech giant was found guilty and fined in 2017, there were about 20 plaintiffs, including Kelkoo, Trivago and Yelp.

Adam, who has built a career in supercomputing, says he had a “eureka moment” for Fundem while smoking a cigarette outside the offices of his former employer.

At the time, price comparison sites were in their infancy, and each specialized in one specific product. But Foundem was different because it allowed customers to compare a wide range of products – from clothing to flights.

“No one else was close to this,” says Shevon, who has been a software consultant for several major global brands.

In its 2017 ruling, the European Commission found that Google had done just that Illegally promoted its own comparison shopping service in search results, while demoting competitors.

Ten years earlier, when he launched Foundem, Adam said he had no reason to believe that Google was deliberately preventing competition in online shopping. “They weren’t really serious players,” he says.

But by the end of 2008, the couple began to suspect foul play.

It was three weeks before Christmas and the couple received a message warning that their website had suddenly become slow to load. They thought it was a cyberattack, “but actually it was just everyone started visiting our website,” Adam laughs.

Channel 5’s The Gadget Show named Foundem the best price comparison site in the UK.

“And that was really important,” Shevon explains, “because then we reached out to Google and said, look, it’s definitely not helpful for users to make it impossible for them to find us.

“And this is still from Google, not a complete ignore, but basically a ‘swamp’.”

“That was the moment we knew we needed to fight,” Adam says.

The couple went to the press, with limited success, and took their case to regulators in the UK, US and Brussels.

Finally – with the European Commission – the case finally got underway, with the launch of an antitrust investigation in November 2010. The pair’s first meeting with regulators was in a caravan in Brussels.

“One of the things they said is if this is a systemic problem, why are you the first people we see?” Shevon recalls. “We said we’re not 100% sure, but we suspect people are afraid, because basically all businesses on the Internet depend on Google for the lifeblood of their traffic.”

The couple were in a hotel room in Brussels, just a few hundred meters from the commission’s building, when competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager finally announced the ruling they, and other shopping sites, had been waiting for.

But there was no popping of champagne corks. Their focus then turned to making sure the European Commission implemented its decision.

“I think it was unfortunate for Google that they did that to us,” Shevon says. “We’re raised with the illusion that we can make a difference, and we really don’t like bullies.”

Even Google’s final defeat in this case last month did not mean the end for the couple.

They believe that Google’s behavior remains anti-competitive and that the European Commission is looking into the matter. In March of this year, under the new Digital Markets Law, the Commission opened an investigation into Google’s parent company, Alphabet, into whether its goods and services were still favored in search results.

A Google spokesperson said: “European Court of Justice [European Court of Justice] Judgment [in 2024] It only relates to how we view product results from 2008 to 2017.

“The changes we made in 2017 to comply with the European Commission’s Shopping Decision have worked for over seven years, generating billions of clicks for over 800 comparison shopping services.

“For this reason, we continue to vigorously contest the claims made by Foundem and will do so when the courts hear the case.”

The Ruff family is also seeking a civil damages suit against Google, which is scheduled to begin in the first half of 2026. But when, or if, the pair’s final victory is achieved, it will likely be expensive — they were forced to close their foundation in 2016.

The long battle against Google has been exhausting for them as well. “I think if we had known it would take as many years as it turned out, we probably wouldn’t have made the same choice,” Adam admits.