EU court annuls €1.49 billion fine against Google

The European Commission fined the US tech giant Google €1.49 billion for unfair competition in online advertising, but the General Court of the European Union annulled the fine in a statement on Wednesday.

The EU’s second-highest court ruled that the EC had not provided sufficient evidence that Google was abusing its dominant position in search engine advertising through its AdSense advertising service.

The American information technology company Microsoft filed a complaint with the EC regarding this service in 2009, and the Commission launched a formal investigation in 2016.

On the other hand, in 2019, the EC fined the company €1.49 billion, recognising that Google and its parent company Alphabet had violated EU competition rules by setting restrictive rules in contracts with websites that use AdSense, thus denying Google’s competitors the right to place their ads on these sites.

But the General Court said on Wednesday that the Commission had not proved that Google’s contracts impeded innovation, harmed consumers, or helped the company maintain and strengthen its dominant position in online search advertising markets.

“The General Court upheld most of the Commission’s findings but set aside the decision in which the Commission imposed a fine of almost EUR 1.5 billion on Google, inter alia, on the grounds that it had not taken into account all relevant circumstances in its assessment of the duration of the contractual provisions that the Commission had found to be unlawful,” the court said in a statement.

On September 10, the Court of Justice of the European Union dismissed Apple’s last appeal against the European Commission’s decision to return €13 billion in unpaid taxes to Ireland, putting an end to a long-running dispute.

Also on September 10, the CJEU upheld a €2.4 billion antitrust fine against Google.