Google has today been fined £2.1billion for promoting its own comparison shopping service at the expense of its competitors.

The European Commission has ruled that the global giant breached EU antitrust rules by giving an illegal advantage to another Google product, its comparison shopping service.

The company must now end the conduct within 90 days or face penalty payments of up to five per cent of the average daily worldwide turnover of Alphabet, Google's parent company.

That penalty would amount to about £11million a day.

Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, in charge of competition policy, said: "Google has come up with many innovative products and services that have made a difference to our lives.

"That's a good thing. But Google's strategy for its comparison shopping service wasn't just about attracting customers by making its product better than those of its rivals.

"Instead, Google abused its market dominance as a search engine by promoting its own comparison shopping service in its search results, and demoting those of competitors.

"What Google has done is illegal under EU antitrust rules.

"It denied other companies the chance to compete on the merits and to innovate, and most importantly, it denied European consumers a genuine choice of services and the full benefits of innovation."

Google's flagship product is the Google search engine, which provides search results to consumers, who pay for the service with their data.

Almost 90 per cent of Google's revenues stem from adverts, such as those it shows consumers in response to a search query.

According to the European Commission, Google has systematically given prominent placement to its own comparison shopping service and demoted rival comparison shopping services in its search result.

It said Google has included a number of criteria in these algorithms, as a result of which rival comparison shopping services are demoted.

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