The European Commission imposed a $2.42-billion euro fine on Google for artificially promoting its own price-comparison shopping service, which made it unfair to other similar services, according to a writeup on the Karanovic & Nikolic website.

This is the largest such fine ever imposed on a single company by the commission, at more than twice the next-highest fine of 1.1 billion euro imposed on Intel eight years ago.

Google entered the European comparison-shopping market in 2004, competing against previously established services. While their initial efforts were unsuccessful,  the company started pushing its own results since the Google search engine already dominated the internet. This increased traffic to google's shopping service by 4.5 times the previous results, which also caused traffic to competing websites to plummet.

Google has three months to remedy the situation by giving equal treatment to rival comparison-shopping companies in Google search results. Other fines may be imposed if the situation is not fixed in the allotted time frame.