The General Court’s Google Shopping Judgment Finetuning the Legal Qualifications and Tests for Platform Abuse

How does one legally qualify the conduct at issue in Google Shopping: as leveraging, favouring, discrimination, refusal to supply, or still some other form of abuse? Qualification questions are not (just) theoretical, given that legal qualifications come with corresponding legal tests, and those tests determine the burden of proof that the European Commission (EC) has to fulfil when establishing an abuse of dominance. The weight of that burden depends on the form of abuse (the legal test for refusal to supply is significantly more demanding than that of tying, for example). Hence, legal qualifications can easily determine the outcome of a case. It is no surprise then that qualification was central to the Google Shopping appeal. Indeed, the first plea of annulment examined by the General Court (GC) was `the legality of the legal classification of favouring adopted by the Commission on the basis of Article 102...