The Turkish antitrust regulator - the Competition Council, has again imposed a fine on Google as part of an investigation into a violation of competition rules in providing search results for hotel reservations on the local market. As stated in the regulator's decision, the fine was over 355 million liras (about 9 million USD).
This is not the first such case. In 2024, the company was already fined $ 15 million. The essence of the claims against the American company, like last year, boils down to the fact that its GOOGLE Hotel Ads-GHA service has an unjustified advantage over local market participants in terms of providing hotel location data, price and comparison on the general search page. As noted in the regulator's decision, this creates obstacles to the full participation of local hotel search services in the hotel advertising market. Their interaction with potential customers is complicated by Google's dominant role.
Google was initially fined 296 million liras (about 7.4 million USD) and given six months to remedy the violations. For each day until the violations were remedied, the fine increased by “0.05% of the company's gross revenue for 2024“
The Competition Commission's decision notes that Google has submitted various proposals to ensure compliance with Turkish law and has introduced some new advertising tools. However, these innovations did not solve the problems for local services and contradicted the obligations imposed on Google.
In this regard, the company received a fine of about 9 million USD, which includes the initial amount and penalties for each day of non-compliance with the requirements of the Turkish regulator.