London, Nov 11 (TIWN) In a major setback to Google, the European Union's General Court on Wednesday upheld an earlier ruling by the European Commission that imposed a $2.8 billion fine on the search engine giant for breaking anti-trust law.

Vestager sanctioned the world's most popular internet search engine in 2017 for favouring its own price-comparison shopping service to give it an unfair advantage against smaller European rivals.  The shopping case was the first of a trio of decisions that have seen Google rack up a total of 8.25 billion euros in EU antitrust fines in the last decade. Vestager subsequently took on Amazon, Apple and Facebook, where investigations are still ongoing.  "The General Court largely dismisses Google's action against the decision of the Commission finding that Google abused its dominant position by favouring its own comparison shopping service over competing comparison shopping services," the Court said.  Google can appeal to the EU Court of Justice (CJEU), Europe's top court, on points of law.