EU General Court Tosses Out a Google Antitrust Fine

Google won a rare antitrust victory this morning when the EU General Court tossed aside a €1.5 billion fine against the online giant tied to 2019 antitrust charges for online advertising abuses.

“The General Court upholds the majority of the [European] Commission’s findings but annuls the decision by which the Commission imposed a fine of almost €1.5 billion on Google, on the ground inter alia that it 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,” an EU General Court announcement explains. “The Commission has not established that the three clauses that it had identified each constituted an abuse of a dominant position and together constituted a single and continuous infringement of Article 102 TFEU [which is related to rules on competition, taxation, and approximation of laws]. The General Court annuls the Commission’s decision in its entirety.”

The European Commission had fined Google €1.5 billion in the pre-DMA era of 2019 for engaging in illegal practices in search advertising to “cement its dominant market position.” Google changed how that business operates in response, but it appealed the fine award the following June. And it has now won that appeal, though the EC could still appeal to the Court of Justice, the EU’s highest court.

It may not bother: The 2019 complaint was narrow compared to the more sweeping antitrust charges that Google now faces in the EU, and it was mostly about fining the firm for prior behavior. But there’s more. One of Google’s more current battles in the EU, incidentally, is also tied to its advertising business. The firm recently lost an appeal for related abuses in online shopping. And Google is currently engaged in a trial in the U.S. over similar abuses related to its advertising business.

“This case is about a very narrow subset of text-only search ads placed on a limited number of publishers’ websites,” a Google statement explains. “We made changes to our contracts in 2016 to remove the relevant provisions, even before the Commission’s decision. We are pleased that the court has recognized errors in the original decision and annulled the fine.”