On Wednesday 18 September, the European Court of Justice annulled a fine of 1.5 billion euros imposed by Brussels in 2019 on Google for abuse of a dominant position in online advertising. The European Union court, which rules in the first instance, announces that “annuls the Commission’s decision in its entirety”believing that the European executive has “I made mistakes” in its assessment. The European Commission will have the possibility to appeal this decision.
The case concerns the Google AdSense advertising network. In March 2019, the Commission decided to fine the technology group €1.5 billion for having imposed restrictive clauses in contracts concluded with websites. The aim, according to Brussels, was to prevent Google AdSense’s competitors from placing their own ads there. The Mountainview firm decided to take legal action and won its case on Wednesday.
In its ruling, the Luxembourg-based court “confirms most of the Commission’s assessments”but cancels the fine “in particular, because it failed to take into account all the relevant circumstances when assessing the duration of the contractual clauses it had deemed abusive”.
The Commission said the infringement occurred over a period of ten years, between 2006 and 2016, when it opened its investigation following an initial complaint from a customer dating back to 2010. Since September 2016, Google had removed certain clauses from its contracts in order to comply.
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This first-instance ruling comes just eight days after the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on the other hand definitively confirmed another fine against Google, of 2.4 billion euros, for anti-competitive practices in the price comparison market, after a seven-year legal battle. The highest EU court ruled that Google had for years made competitors to its Google Shopping service virtually invisible to consumers.
In total, the Californian giant was fined more than 8 billion euros for various competition infringements. In addition to its price comparison and advertising network, Google was also found guilty in Europe of infringements regarding its Android mobile operating system. It was sentenced to a record fine of 4.34 billion euros in July 2018. This fine was reduced to 4.1 billion in September 2022. However, it remains the highest ever imposed by the European Commission, the EU’s competition watchdog.
