After a lengthy legal battle over Google’s supposed abusive practices, the tech giant reigns victorious after the EU court annulled the $1.6 billion fine imposed on the company.
In March 2019, the European Commission fined the company €1.49 billion ($1.6 billion) for breaking EU antitrust rules.
Google had supposedly “abused its market dominance by imposing a number of restrictive clauses in contracts with third-party websites which prevent Google’s rivals from placing their search adverts on these websites,” the European Commission said. This was supposedly going on between 2006 and 2016.
Since 2003, Google has controlled an advertising platform called AdSense, which includes a service called AdSense for Search (AFS).
This allows websites with search engines to show advertisements about what people have looked for online. Those who control these websites can earn a share of the revenue made from these ads.
If those websites generate enough traffic and revenue, they could enter into a specific contract with Google, known as the Google Service Agreement (GSA).
However, there’s a catch, or rather, a clause that restricted or hindered these sites from showing ads from Google’s competitors.
Yet, in a rare turn of events, Google has won the legal battle, and the fine has been annulled.
“The General Court upholds the majority of the Commission’s findings but annuls the decision by which the Commission imposed a fine of almost €1.5 billion on Google,” the Court of Justice of the European Union said.
Google is pleased with the outcome and that “the court has recognized errors in the original decision,” the BBC reported.
However, Google’s journey is not all plain sailing. The tech giant has a few other battles to conquer.
A US Federal District judge slammed Alphabet’s Google, finding the tech behemoth guilty of violating US antitrust laws to become the world’s default search engine.
“Google is a monopolist,” declared US Judge Amit Mehta in his landmark ruling in Washington, DC courts.
Yet the tech giant said it will appeal the decision, which means that a long battle will ensue, most likely throughout the majority of 2025, if not longer.
In Europe, the ECJ dismissed Google’s appeal to overturn the €2.4 billion ($2.7 billion) fine the tech behemoth was slapped with after abusing its dominant position.
The court claims that Google positioned its own comparison shopping service in a primary position and promoted them in “boxes” with attractive image information, while competitors’ comparison shopping services were displayed as generic results.
Google tried to appeal the decision to the EU’s General Court and the ECJ, but both rejected the appeals.
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