Brussels (The Brussels Morning Newspaper) – Google succeeded in a court challenge against a €1.49-billion fine imposed by the European Union for abuse of dominance over online advertising.
A European Union court scrapped a 1.49-billion euro ($1.65 billion) fine levied by Brussels against Google for an abuse of dominance over online advertising. “The General Court rejects the European Commission’s decision in its entirety,” the Luxembourg-based court stated in a statement, adding that the “institution committed errors in its assessment”.
what was the court’s reasoning for overturning the EU’s decision?
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 stated.
The EU Commission, the EU’s influential competition regulator, expressed it “takes note” and would “carefully study the judgment and reflect on possible next steps” — which could include an appeal.
How does the ruling affect Google’s legal battles with the EU?
The ruling will be a comfort for Google after the EU’s highest court last week supported a 2017 fine worth 2.42 billion euros for manipulating its dominance by favoring its own comparison shopping service. As part of a significant push to target big tech abuses, the EU slapped Google with penalties worth a total of 8.2 billion euros between 2017 and 2019 over antitrust violations. The 1.49-billion euro fine is the third of those fines, focused on Google’s AdSense service.
But the long-running lawful battles between Google and the EU do not end there.
How has the EU targeted Google for antitrust violations in recent years?
Google is also contesting a 4.3-billion-euro penalty Brussels levied on it for putting limitations on Android smartphones to increase its internet search business. The 2018 fine remains the EU’s largest-ever antitrust penalty. The General Court 2022 slightly decreased the fine to 4.1 billion euros but mainly kept the commission’s argument that Google had imposed illegal restrictions.
The legal saga persists 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 effective legal weapon understood as the Digital Markets Act (DMA), to rein in tech giants including Google.
Rather than regulators finding egregious antitrust offenses after probes lasting many years, the DMA gives businesses a checklist of what they can and cannot do online. The objective is that tech titans change their ways before the condition for deterrent fines. Google is already the subject of one examination under the DMA alongside Facebook owner Meta and Apple.
