Google lifts EU antitrust fine of €1.5 billion

Google has successfully overturned a €1.5 billion antitrust fine imposed by the European Commission five years ago. Judges at the European Court of First Instance overturned the decision because the Commission made errors in assessing the company’s advertising contracts.

Specifically, the Commission failed to demonstrate that Google’s agreements with publishers potentially discouraged innovation, helped the company maintain its dominant position and ultimately harmed consumers. Despite upholding most of the EU’s findings, this factor meant that Google could not be found to have breached competition rules.

Timeline of events

In 2019, the Commission fined Google for imposing anti-competitive agreements on third-party websites using the AdSense platform, preventing competitors’ ads from being displayed alongside Google search results and limiting competition between 2006 and 2016. The decision was initially taken in response to a complaint from Microsoft.

Google appealed the fine and said the Commission made “significant errors of analysis” during a 2022 hearing, according to Bloomberg. It was the third major antitrust fine imposed by the EU on the Alphabet-owned company in the past decade, following earlier fines related to Android and Google Shopping.

Google spokesman Jay Stoll said today that the company amended its agreements in 2016 to remove the relevant provisions, before the Commission’s decision, and that the case affected only a narrow subset of text-only search ads placed on a limited number of publisher sites.

“We are pleased that the court has recognised the errors in the original decision and cancelled the fine,” he told Reuters.

The EU can appeal the CFI decision, but that would have to raise legal issues in the bloc’s highest court, the Court of Justice. It can do so given that the CFI has agreed with many of its conclusions and that it succeeded in two other legal battles just last week:

The Commission fined Google €4.34 billion for abusing its dominant market position by pre-installing the Google search engine on Android devices in 2018, but the company has since appealed to the European Court of Justice.

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Google’s EU, UK and US regulatory conflicts are far from over

This is not the last word the search giant will receive from European regulators, although antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager, who has led many of the legal disputes, will step down from her position at the end of this year.

An investigation into whether Google favors its own ad tech services is ongoing, but initial findings from last year indicated the only way to resolve competition concerns would be a “mandatory divestiture” of part of its ad tech business.

There is also another ongoing EU investigation into Google’s compliance with the new Digital Markets Act. Regulators say the tech giant promotes its own services above third-party services in search results and therefore “controls access.” In March, Google temporarily removed some search widgets, such as Google Flights, to allow more access for individual companies in response to the DMA coming into force.

Google’s legal battles aren’t limited to the EU. Earlier this month, the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority provisionally ruled that the tech giant’s dominance of the ad tech market was harmful to competitors. Google is also seeking to appeal a U.K. court’s decision in June that allowed a similar antitrust lawsuit by a group of online publishers to proceed to trial.

The U.S. Department of Justice and state attorneys general launched an antitrust investigation in 2020, alleging that Google “illegally used distribution agreements to thwart competition.” That investigation is still ongoing. Additionally, in August, a federal judge ruled that the tech company had a monopoly on general search and text advertising services and had violated antitrust law.