Although Viagogo is celebrating a legal ruling that said the ticketing site had complied with a court order from last year, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has confirmed that its contempts of court proceedings will still continue.
A day after Google suspended Viagogo from using its search engine marketing adwords platform to reach consumers, a judge ruled that Viagogo had complied with a court order that forced the company to display clear information on its site of the face value of tickets. Viagogo said that it was “delighted” about the “victory.”
“This hearing further demonstrates that there are matters of interpretation of the order on which the CMA should not and cannot be relied upon to make the final determination,” Viagogo’s MD Cris Miller said of the ruling. “We originally disagreed with the CMA on this, and today’s announcement validates our position and demonstrates clearly the necessity of being able to challenge the CMA’s authority.
“It is clear there remains continued, yet unfounded resistance from the CMA to our role in the market. Regardless, we are hopeful that now we can focus on the platform and the millions of consumers who rely on it.”
One of the obligations Viagogo had to follow related to the display of original face value of any ticket being resold. This information can now be found on its UK site by hovering the mouse over the icon “FV,” which outlines the face value price. However, a judge ruled that hover text could not be used in this specific circumstance. The CMA noted in a statement that Viagogo could not use hover text “unless specifically allowed by the order and it needs to stop displaying important information about deadlines under its guarentee this way.”
“Although the court found that information about face value prices can be displayed with hover over text on one page of the site, Viagogo must still display this information on two other separate places on the face of its website,” the CMA said in a statement.
Following the judgement regarding Viagogo’s compliance displaying the face value of tickets on its site, a CMA spokesperson said that the judgement “does not mean that Viagogo is compliant with the court order the CMA secured against it” and the ruling only related to a small element of its case against the ticketing company.
“We still think that Viagogo is breaching parts of the order and so continue to move forward with legal proceedings for contempt of court against the site in relation to those concerns,” the spokesperson said.
The CMA’s case against Viagogo, which first took-off in 2018, demands that the website displays clear information about brokers selling tickets on its site, stops pressure-selling tactics, and publishes seat details.
