The case has been hailed as a landmark moment in global regulation of Big Tech.
“Google basically made us disappear from the internet.”
Launch days are equal parts exciting and terrifying for many entrepreneurs, but there may not be one worse than the one Shivaun Raff and her husband, Adam, experienced.
It was June 2006 and Foundem, the couple’s innovative price comparison website (for which they had given up high-paying jobs and built from scratch), had just gone live.
“Google basically made us disappear from the internet.”
Launch days are equal parts exciting and terrifying for many entrepreneurs, but there may not be one worse than the one Shivaun Raff and her husband, Adam, experienced.
It was June 2006 and Foundem, the couple’s innovative price comparison website (for which they had given up high-paying jobs and built from scratch), had just gone live.
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They didn’t know it at the time, but that day, and the ones that followed, would mark the beginning of the end of their venture.
Foundem was hit by one of Google’s automated spam filters, causing the website to rank very low in search results for queries like “price comparison” and “comparison shopping.”
This meant that the couple’s website, which charged a fee when customers clicked on its product listings to access other websites, was struggling to make money.
“We were monitoring our pages and how they were ranking, and then we saw them all plummet almost immediately,” Adam says.
While Foundem’s launch day did not go as planned, it would lead to the start of something more: a 15-year legal battle that ended with Google being fined a record 2.4 billion euros (about $2.6 billion) for abusing its market dominance.
The case has been hailed as a landmark moment in global regulation of Big Tech.
Google spent seven years fighting the verdict, which was handed down in June 2017, but the European Court of Justice rejected its appeals in September this year.
In their first interview since that final verdict, Shivaun and Adam told the BBC that they initially thought the halting launch of their website had simply been a mistake.
“At first we thought it was collateral damage, that we had been detected as spam as a false positive,” says Shivaun, 55. “We just assumed we had to go to the right place and it would be overridden.”
“Google basically made us disappear from the internet.”
Launch days are equal parts exciting and terrifying for many entrepreneurs, but there may not be one worse than the one Shivaun Raff and her husband, Adam, experienced.
It was June 2006 and Foundem, the couple’s innovative price comparison website (for which they had given up high-paying jobs and built from scratch), had just gone live.
Advertising
They didn’t know it at the time, but that day, and the ones that followed, would mark the beginning of the end of their venture.
Foundem was hit by one of Google’s automated spam filters, causing the website to rank very low in search results for queries like “price comparison” and “comparison shopping.”
This meant that the couple’s website, which charged a fee when customers clicked on its product listings to access other websites, was struggling to make money.
Advertising
“We were monitoring our pages and how they were ranking, and then we saw them all plummet almost immediately,” Adam says.
While Foundem’s launch day did not go as planned, it would lead to the start of something more: a 15-year legal battle that ended with Google being fined a record 2.4 billion euros (about $2.6 billion) for abusing its market dominance.
Advertising
Denying access
The case has been hailed as a landmark moment in global regulation of Big Tech.
Google spent seven years fighting the verdict, which was handed down in June 2017, but the European Court of Justice rejected its appeals in September this year.
In their first interview since that final verdict, Shivaun and Adam told the BBC that they initially thought the halting launch of their website had simply been a mistake.
“At first we thought it was collateral damage, that we had been detected as spam as a false positive,” says Shivaun, 55. “We just assumed we had to go to the right place and it would be overridden.”
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“If you are denied access, you have nothing to do,” adds Adam, 58.
The couple sent numerous requests to Google to lift the restriction, but more than two years later, nothing had changed and they said they had received no response.
Meanwhile, his website was “ranking perfectly normally” on other search engines, which didn’t really matter, according to Shivaun, since “everyone uses Google . ”
The couple would later discover that their site was not the only one Google had targeted: When the tech giant was found guilty and fined in 2017, there were around 20 plaintiffs, including Kelkoo, Trivago and Yelp.
Adam, who had built his career in supercomputing, says he got the idea for Foundem while smoking a cigarette outside the offices of his former job.
Back then, price comparison websites were in their infancy and each specialised in a particular product. But Foundem was different because it allowed customers to compare a wide range of products, from clothing to flights.
“Google basically made us disappear from the internet.”
Launch days are equal parts exciting and terrifying for many entrepreneurs, but there may not be one worse than the one Shivaun Raff and her husband, Adam, experienced.
It was June 2006 and Foundem, the couple’s innovative price comparison website (for which they had given up high-paying jobs and built from scratch), had just gone live.
Advertising
They didn’t know it at the time, but that day, and the ones that followed, would mark the beginning of the end of their venture.
Foundem was hit by one of Google’s automated spam filters, causing the website to rank very low in search results for queries like “price comparison” and “comparison shopping.”
This meant that the couple’s website, which charged a fee when customers clicked on its product listings to access other websites, was struggling to make money.
Advertising
“We were monitoring our pages and how they were ranking, and then we saw them all plummet almost immediately,” Adam says.
While Foundem’s launch day did not go as planned, it would lead to the start of something more: a 15-year legal battle that ended with Google being fined a record 2.4 billion euros (about $2.6 billion) for abusing its market dominance.
Advertising
Denying access
The case has been hailed as a landmark moment in global regulation of Big Tech.
Google spent seven years fighting the verdict, which was handed down in June 2017, but the European Court of Justice rejected its appeals in September this year.
In their first interview since that final verdict, Shivaun and Adam told the BBC that they initially thought the halting launch of their website had simply been a mistake.
“At first we thought it was collateral damage, that we had been detected as spam as a false positive,” says Shivaun, 55. “We just assumed we had to go to the right place and it would be overridden.”
Advertising
“If you are denied access, you have nothing to do,” adds Adam, 58.
The couple sent numerous requests to Google to lift the restriction, but more than two years later, nothing had changed and they said they had received no response.
Meanwhile, his website was “ranking perfectly normally” on other search engines, which didn’t really matter, according to Shivaun, since “everyone uses Google . ”
The couple would later discover that their site was not the only one Google had targeted: When the tech giant was found guilty and fined in 2017, there were around 20 plaintiffs, including Kelkoo, Trivago and Yelp.
Adam, who had built his career in supercomputing, says he got the idea for Foundem while smoking a cigarette outside the offices of his former job.
Back then, price comparison websites were in their infancy and each specialised in a particular product. But Foundem was different because it allowed customers to compare a wide range of products, from clothing to flights.
“No one else was coming close to this,” says Shivaun, who has been a software consultant for several major global brands.
Error or anti-competitive practice?
In its 2017 ruling, the European Commission found that Google had illegally promoted its own price comparison service in search results while demoting those of competitors.
Ten years earlier, however, when Foundem was launched, Adam says he had no reason to suspect that Google was being deliberately anti-competitive in online shopping. “They weren’t really serious players,” he says.
But by late 2008, the couple had begun to suspect foul play.
It was three weeks before Christmas when they received a message warning them that their website had suddenly become slow to load. They thought it was a cyber attack, “but in reality it was just that everyone had started visiting our website,” Adam says.
A TV show had just named Foundem the best price comparison website in the UK.
“And that was really important,” Shivaun explains, “because we reached out to Google and said, ‘Look, it’s probably not in your users’ best interest to make it impossible for them to find us.
“And yet Google, while not completely ignoring us, basically told us to ‘go away.’”
“That was the moment we knew we had to fight,” Adam says.
The couple turned to the press, with limited success, and took their case to regulators in the UK, US and Brussels.
It was in the latter instance, before the European Commission (EC), that the case finally took off, with the launch of an antitrust investigation in November 2010. The pair’s first meeting with regulators took place in a portable booth in Brussels.
“One of the things they said was, if this is a systemic problem, why are you the first ones we see?” Shivaun recalls. “We said we weren’t 100% sure, but we suspected people were scared, because every company on the internet essentially relies on Google for their livelihood, which is their traffic.”
“We don’t like bullies”
The couple were in a hotel room in Brussels, just a few hundred metres from the European Commission building, when Competition Commissioner Margarethe Vestager finally announced the verdict they and other shopping websites had been waiting for.
But there was no popping of champagne. The focus now turned to ensuring that the EC enforced its decision.
“I guess it was a disgrace for Google to have done this to us ,” Shivaun says. “We have both been raised perhaps under the illusion that we can make a difference, and we really don’t like bullies . ”
But even Google’s final defeat in the case last month did not represent the end for the couple.
They believe that Google’s conduct remains anti-competitive and is currently under investigation by the EC. In March this year, under its new Digital Markets Act, the Commission opened an investigation into Google’s parent company Alphabet over whether it continues to give preference to its own goods and services in search results.
A Google spokesperson said: “The CJEU [Court of Justice of the European Union] ruling [in 2024] only relates to how we displayed product results between 2008 and 2017.
“The changes we made in 2017 to comply with the European Commission’s decision on product comparison shopping have worked successfully 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 examine the case.”
The Raffs have also filed a civil damages suit against Google. But if there is a final victory for the couple, it is likely to be a Pyrrhic one: they were forced to close Foundem in 2016.
The long fight against Google has also been exhausting for them. “I think if we had known it was going to take so many years, we might not have made the same decision,” Adam admits.
