Image: © Katherine Welles/Stock.adobe.com
Google’s appeal was successful in this case, but it recently lost an appeal against a €2.42bn EU fine and is still facing various legal challenges around the world.
Google has scored a legal victory against the European Commission, cancelling a €1.49bn fine it received in 2019 for alleged abusive advertising practices.
The EU’s General Court said it upheld the majority of the Commission’s findings against Google but has annulled the €1.49bn fine. The court said the Commission failed to take “all the relevant circumstances” into consideration when it issued this fine.
The 2019 fine was issued after complaints and investigations into AdSense, Google’s advertising platform used for various services. The Commission claimed Google abused its dominance in this area by imposing restrictive clauses in contracts with third-party websites, preventing rivals from placing search adverts on these websites.
Google challenged this fine and the General Court now claims that the Commission “committed errors in its assessment of the duration of the clauses at issue, as well as of the market covered by them in 2016”.
“In particular, the General Court finds that the Commission has not demonstrated that the clauses in question had been capable of deterring publishers from sourcing from Google’s competing intermediaries or that they had been capable of preventing those competitors from accessing a significant part of the market for online search advertising intermediation in the European Economic Area,” the ruling said.
The Commission said it would consider possible next steps, which could include an appeal to the EU’s top court, the BBC reports.
This was one of three major fines the Commission issued against Google between 2017 and 2019, which amounted to roughly €8.25bn. The biggest of these was a €4.34bn fine issued against Google in 2018 for allegedly using the market power of its Android operating system to block rival browsers and search apps.
Just last week, Google lost its appeal against a €2.42bn fine it was issued in 2017. The Commission issued this fine when it found that Google abused its dominant position in several national online search markets, giving the tech giant an “illegal advantage” with its own comparison-shopping service.
Google’s legal troubles do not end here however, as the tech giant is being probed around the world for its market dominance.
Google’s recent defeat in a major US antitrust case could have serious consequences for the company. It plans to appeal that verdict and argued that its position as the world’s best search engine is what makes it attractive to customers.
Its parent company Alphabet is also facing a £13.6bn lawsuit brought forward by online publishers in the UK accusing the tech giant of anticompetitive behaviour in the adtech space.
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