EU General Court annuls $1.7 billion antitrust fine against Google

The European Union’s general court on Wednesday annulled a $1.7 billion antitrust fine imposed by the European Commission on Google over its AdSense advertising platform.

The court upheld “most” of the European Commission’s preliminary findings but annulled the fine, finding that the Commission “failed to take into account all relevant circumstances in its assessment of the duration of the contractual clauses that the Commission found to be abusive.”

A Google spokesperson told CNBC the company will carefully review the decision.

“This case involves a very narrow subset of search text ads placed on a limited number of publisher sites,” a Google spokesperson said. “We amended our agreements in 2016 to remove the terms in question, prior to the Commission’s decision. We are pleased that the court recognized the errors in the original decision and overturned the fine.”

The European Commission found in March 2019 that Google had committed three separate infringements of European competition law relating to three clauses of the Google Services Agreement.

The commission found that these clauses could prevent other services from competing with Google’s ad intermediation service called AdSense for Search.

Google mediates the display of advertisements on third-party websites.

According to the Court of First Instance, the GSA agreements contained clauses restricting or prohibiting the display of advertisements for services competing with AFS.

“The Court, after endorsing most of the Commission’s findings, finds that the Commission made errors in its assessment of the duration of the contested clauses, as well as the market they concerned in 2016,” the Court said in a statement. “The Commission has not established that the three clauses it identified constituted an abuse of a dominant position and, taken together, constituted a single and continuous infringement of Article 102 TFEU. The Court annuls the Commission’s decision in its entirety.”

The Court found that the Commission had failed to take into account all the relevant circumstances of the case.

The commission has the right to appeal and said it will review the decision to decide on any further steps.