Shivaun and Adam Raff
Shivaun Raff and her husband, Adam, are engaged in a long legal battle with Google.
“Google basically wiped us off the internet.”
Launch days. They're both exciting and terrifying for many startup founders, but they don't come much worse than the one experienced by Shivaun Raff and her husband, Adam.
It was June 2006, and the couple's pioneering price comparison website, Foundem – a site they had sacrificed well-paid jobs to build from scratch – had just become fully operational.
They didn't know it at the time, but that day, and those that followed, would mark the beginning of the end of their business.
Foundem had been hit by a Google search penalty, caused by one of the search engine's automatic spam filters. This pushed the website to the very bottom of search results lists for relevant queries like “price comparison” and “comparison shopping.”
This meant the couple's website, which charged fees when customers clicked on their product listings through other websites, struggled to make money.
“We were monitoring our pages and their rankings, and then we saw them all drop almost immediately,” says Adam.
Even though Foundem's launch day didn't go as planned, it led to the start of something else: a 15-year legal battle that resulted in a then-record $2.4 billion fine. euros (£2 billion) for Google, which was considered to have abused their dominant market position.
The case has been hailed as a historic moment in the global regulation of Big Tech.
Google spent seven years fighting this verdict, delivered in June 2017, but in September this year Europe's highest court – the European Court of Justice – rejected its appeals.
Speaking to Radio 4's The Bottom Line in their first interview since that final verdict, Shivaun and Adam explained that at first they thought the shaky start to their website had simply been a mistake.
“At first we thought it was collateral damage, that we had been detected as spam by false positives,” says Shivaun, 55. “We just assumed we had to intervene in the right place and the case would be overturned.”
“If you are refused traffic, then you have nothing to do,” adds Adam, 58 years old.
The couple sent numerous requests to Google to have the restriction lifted but, more than two years later, nothing has changed and they say they have received no response.
Meanwhile, their website was “ranking just fine” on other search engines, but that didn't really matter, according to Shivaun, because “everyone uses Google.”
The couple would later discover that their site wasn't the only one that had been disadvantaged by Google: When the tech giant was found guilty and fined in 2017, there were around 20 plaintiffs, including Kelkoo, Trivago and Yelp.
Adam, who built a career in supercomputing, says he had the “eureka moment” for Foundem while smoking a cigarette outside his former employer’s offices.
At the time, price comparison sites were in their infancy and each specialized 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 at this level,” beams Shivaun, who herself has been a software consultant for several major global brands.
In its 2017 judgment, the European Commission found that Google had illegally promoted its own price comparison service in search results, while demoting those of its competitors.
However, ten years ago – when Foundem launched – Adam said he had no reason to assume that Google was being deliberately anti-competitive when it came to online shopping. “They weren’t really serious players,” he says.
But by the end of 2008, the couple began to suspect foul play.
It was three weeks before Christmas and the pair received a message warning them that their website had suddenly become slow to load. They thought it was a cyberattack, “but actually everyone had started visiting our website,” Adam laughs.
Channel 5's The Gadget Show had just named Foundem the best price comparison site in the UK.
“And that was really important,” says Shivaun, “because then we contacted Google and said, look, it's probably not benefiting your users to prevent them from finding us.
“And this still comes from Google, not complete ignorance, but a 'quagmire'.”
“That’s when we realized: OK, we have to fight,” Adam says.
Based
The couple went to the press, with limited success, and took their case to regulators in the UK, US and Brussels.
It was within the latter – with the European Commission (EC) – that the affair finally took off, with the launch of an antitrust investigation in November 2010. The couple's first meeting with regulators took place held in a portable cabin in Brussels.
“One of the things they said was if this is a systemic problem, why are you the first people we see?” Shivaun remembers. “We said we weren't 100% sure, but we suspect people are afraid because every business on the Internet essentially depends on Google for the lifeblood of their traffic.”
“We don’t like tyrants”
The couple were in a hotel room in Brussels, just a few hundred meters from the commission building, when Competition Commissioner Margarethe Vestager finally announced the verdict they and others had been waiting for. online sales sites.
But the champagne corks didn't pop. Their focus then shifted to ensuring that the EC implemented its decision.
“I guess it’s a shame Google did this to us,” Shivaun says. “We were both raised perhaps under the illusion that we can make a difference, and we really don't like bullies.”
Even Google's final defeat in this case last month did not sound the death knell for the couple.
They believe that Google's behavior remains anti-competitive and that the European Commission is investigating this issue. In March this year, under its new Digital Markets Act, the commission opened an investigation into Google's parent company, Alphabet, into whether it continues to favor its own products and services in search results.
A Google spokesperson said: “The CJEU (European Court of Justice) ruling (in 2024) only concerns how we showed product results from 2008 to 2017.
“The changes we made in 2017 to comply with the European Commission's Shopping decision have worked successfully for over seven years, generating billions of clicks for over 800 price comparison services.
“For this reason, we continue to vigorously dispute Foundem’s claims and will do so when the matter comes before the courts.”
The Raffs are also pursuing damages against Google, which is expected to begin in the first half of 2026. But when, or if, a final victory comes for the couple, it will likely be a Pyrrhic victory – they have been forced to close shop. Founded in 2016.
The long fight against Google was also grueling for them. “I think if we had known it would take as many years as it turned out, we might not have made the same choice,” Adam admits.
