Google Launches Final Appeal of EU Antitrust Ruling Against Android

Google is squaring off against regulators from the European Commissions today in the EU Court of Justice in Luxembourg. The online giant is hoping to overturn an EC ruling that found it guilty of abusing its market power in the smartphone market and the resulting €4.125 billion fine, an EU record.

The EC charged Google with three crimes related to Android. It illegally required phone makers to accept Google Search and the Chrome web browser as preinstalled defaults if they wanted access to the Google Play Store. It paid off phone makers and wireless carriers to exclusively install Google Search on devices. And it prevented phone makers from using alternative versions of Android not approved by Google. Each of these actions was undertaken to reduce competition and ensure that Google’s key products and services were adopted as broadly as possible.

The case dates back to 2018, and though Google originally said it would comply with EU demands, it announced an appeal of the ruling in 2021. That appeal began in late 2021, but the EU General Court upheld the ruling while reducing the fine from €4.3 billion to €4.125 billion. So this is the final battle in this case: The Court of Justice is the highest court in the EU.

“Google does not contest or shy away from its responsibility under the law, but the Commission also has a responsibility when it runs investigations, when it seeks to reshape markets and second-guess pro-competitive business models, and when it imposes multi-billion-euro fines,” Google lawyer Alfonso Lamadrid told the court today. “In this case, the Commission failed to discharge its burden and its responsibility and, relying on multiple errors of law, punished Google for its superior merits, attractiveness and innovation.”

EU lawyers, meanwhile, simply defended an EC ruling that has already survived an appeal intact, noting that Google implemented a classic “carrots and sticks strategy” to ensure that phone makers and wireless carriers did its bidding to lock out the competition. That is, when threats didn’t work, it simply paid them off.

A final ruling is still months away, and it cannot be appealed.