The Patent and Market Court in Stockholm will deliver its judgment in PriceRunner v. Google on July 1, 2026, after postponing publication of the ruling for the third time. Klarna, the Swedish fintech that owns the price-comparison service PriceRunner, notified investors of the rescheduling on June 24.

The court pushed back the judgment from June 26, citing "high workload" as the reason it needs additional time. The Patent and Market Court had already moved the verdict from April 15 to June 10, then from June 10 to June 26, before the latest delay.

"As with the Court's two previous notifications, the rescheduling is a procedural decision by the Court and relates solely to the timing of the judgment delivery," Klarna stated. "No inference about the outcome should be drawn from it."

PriceRunner is pursuing $8.3 billion in antitrust damages against Google — the largest follow-on claim tied to the European Union's comparison-shopping crackdown. The trial ran from October 20 to December 19, 2025.

How the claim arose

PriceRunner's action rests on a 2017 European Commission decision that found Google had abused its dominance in online comparison shopping. The Court of Justice of the European Union upheld that ruling in 2024, foreclosing Google's principal route of appeal at the EU level.

"PriceRunner alleges that Google systematically demoted competing price comparison services in its search results while favoring its own Google Shopping product, causing sustained and quantifiable commercial damage to PriceRunner over more than a decade," Klarna said in a February press release.

Google's defense

Google has rejected the suit at every turn. A company representative told the news agency AFP in October: "We strongly oppose this lawsuit and look forward to presenting our case in court."

Google points to platform changes it introduced in 2017 to comply with EU requirements. The company says the number of price comparison sites using its platform climbed from seven at the time of the Commission decision to 1,550 by October.

Parent company Alphabet acknowledged in a recent filing that it faces antitrust proceedings, private individual actions and collective suits in the U.S., across Europe, and in other jurisdictions. "We believe we have strong arguments against these open claims and will defend ourselves vigorously," Alphabet stated.

Why practitioners are watching

The Stockholm ruling carries weight beyond the two parties. A win for PriceRunner would deliver the first quantification of follow-on damages by a private comparator under the 2017 Commission decision, giving claimants in other EU member states a benchmark for valuing similar claims.

Counsel tracking the file should note several signals from the procedural history:

• The court has rescheduled judgment publication three times since April, an unusually compressed timeline for a major antitrust ruling.
• Klarna's investor-channel framing — emphasizing that delay carries "no inference about the outcome" — signals careful messaging around a verdict that could materially affect Klarna's reported contingent liability.
• The Patent and Market Court of Sweden has emerged as a leading venue for EU competition follow-on litigation, alongside Amsterdam and Dublin.

Wider exposure

The Stockholm case sits inside a broader enforcement wave against Google. Alphabet faces follow-on damages actions in several member states, parallel U.S. private and class actions, and additional proceedings elsewhere. The Commission's 2017 finding and the CJEU's 2024 affirmation gave private claimants a clean evidentiary anchor; the Stockholm court will be the first national tribunal to translate that anchor into a concrete damages figure.

Practitioners advising on similar claims should treat the ruling as a precedent-setter for damages methodology, regardless of which side prevails. The judgment will also test how Swedish courts weigh Google's 2017 platform changes as a mitigating factor — an issue that recurs across the company's pending European litigation.

Klarna said it would disclose the verdict through its investor-relations channel on July 1.