AFP – An European Union (EU) court yesterday scrapped a EUR1.49-billion (USD1.65 billion) fine imposed by Brussels against Google for an abuse of dominance over online advertising.
“The General Court annuls the (European) Commission’s decision in its entirety,” the Luxembourg-based court said in a statement, adding that the “institution committed errors in its assessment”.
Brussels “failed to take into consideration all the relevant circumstances in its assessment of the duration of the contract clauses that the commission had deemed abusive”, the court said.
The commission, the EU’s influential competition regulator, said it “takes note” and would “carefully study the judgement and reflect on possible next steps” – which could include an appeal.
The ruling will be a relief for Google after the EU’s highest court last week upheld a 2017 fine worth EUR2.42 billion for abusing its dominance by favouring its own comparison shopping service.
As part of a major push to target big tech abuses, the EU slapped Google with fines worth a total of EUR8.2 billion between 2017 and 2019 over antitrust violations. The EUR1.49-billion fine is the third of those penalties, focused on Google’s AdSense service.
But the long-running legal battles between Google and the EU do not end there. Google is also challenging a EUR4.3-billion penalty Brussels levied on it for putting restrictions on Android smartphones to boost its internet search business.
The 2018 fine remains the EU’s largest-ever antitrust penalty.
The General Court in 2022 slightly reduced the fine to EUR4.1 billion, but mainly supported the commission’s argument that Google had imposed illegal restrictions. The legal saga continues in that case after Google appealed the latest decision before the higher European Court of Justice.
The EU has since armed itself with a more powerful legal weapon known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA), to rein in tech giants including Google. Rather than regulators discovering egregious antitrust violations after probes lasting many years, the DMA gives businesses a list of what they can and cannot do online.
The aim is that tech titans change their ways before the need for deterrent fines.
