One of lime and one of sand. If last week the European Commission won a victory in Luxembourg when the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) confirmed a fine of 2.4 billion euros to Google for abuse of position in the comparison service of services, this Wednesday, the Vice-President Margrethe Vestager The department takes a blow. The General Court of the EU (TGEU) annulled the fine of 1.5 billion that Brussels had imposed in 2019 on the Silicon Valley company for having attacked the competition of advertising with the platform AdSense.
The Luxembourg judges consider that the European Commission was right in its diagnosis, but made a mistake in the procedure for sanctioning the company, thus annulling the decision of the Community government. However, the sentence can be appealed.
In March 2019, in the midst of the battle in Brussels against the violation of antitrust rules by “big tech”, Vestager announced a fine for Google that reached 1.29% of its business volume. After an investigation, the EU Competition Department – which will now return to Spanish Vice President Teresa Ribera – concluded that Google, through AdSense, had abused its dominant market position by imposing a series of restrictive clauses in contracts with third-party sites that prevented its competitors from placing their searches on these web pages. The complaint came from a German company in 2010, which was joined by Microsoft, Expedia and Deutsche Telekom in the following years.
The TGEU considers that the European Commission was right in its argument, but that it “erred in its assessment of the duration of the clauses” unfairly imposed by Google (and which the company removed in 2016). “The Commission has not demonstrated that the three clauses it identified each constituted an abuse of a dominant position and together constituted a single and continuous infringement of Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU. [que prohíbe la posición dominante de una o más empresas en el mercado único]”, declares the TGUE, which annuls the decision of the European Commission in its entirety.
The 1.5 billion is blocked in a deposit pending the end of the legal process. The European Commission can now appeal this decision. If the CJEU agrees, the money would be distributed among the member states according to each one’s quota.
