The European Court of Justice annulled on Wednesday 18 September a fine of 1.5 billion euros imposed by Brussels in 2019 against Google for abuse of a dominant position in online advertising. The EU General Court, which rules at first instance, announced that it “annuls the Commission’s decision in its entirety”, considering that the European executive “made errors” in its assessment. The European Commission will have the possibility of appealing this decision.
The case concerns the advertising network Google AdSense. In March 2019, the Commission decided to fine the technology group €1.5 billion for having imposed restrictive clauses in contracts with websites. The aim, according to Brussels, was to prevent Google AdSense competitors from placing their own ads there.
The Mountainview firm had decided to file a legal appeal and won its case on Wednesday. In its ruling, the Luxembourg-based court “confirmed most of the Commission’s assessments”, but annulled the fine “on the grounds in particular that it failed to take into account all the relevant circumstances in its assessment of the duration of the contractual clauses that it had described as abusive”. For the Commission, the infringement was observed over a period of ten years between 2006 and 2016, the year in which it opened its investigation after an initial customer complaint dating back to 2010. As early as September 2016, Google had removed certain clauses from its contracts to comply.
“Errors in the initial decision”
“We amended our contracts in 2016 to remove the relevant provisions, even before the Commission’s decision. We are pleased that the court has acknowledged errors in the initial decision and annulled the fine,” a spokesperson for the group said on Wednesday. The European Commission, for its part, “takes note of the ruling” and stresses that it will study it “carefully and consider possible next steps,” in a statement.
This first instance judgment comes just eight days after the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on the contrary definitively confirmed another fine against Google, of 2.4 billion euros, for anti-competitive practices on the market of price comparison sites, after seven years of legal battle. The highest court of the EU considered that Google had for years made the competitors of its Google Shopping service practically invisible to consumers.
In total, the Californian giant has been fined more than 8 billion euros for various breaches of competition law. In addition to its price comparison site and its advertising network, Google has been found to be in breach in Europe regarding its Android operating system for mobile phones. It was fined a record 4.34 billion euros in July 2018. This fine was reduced to 4.1 billion in September 2022. It nevertheless remains the highest ever imposed by the European Commission, the guardian of competition in the EU. Google has also appealed this sanction before the CJEU. The group is also in the crosshairs of the regulatory authorities in the United States. Since Monday, it has been facing its second major trial in less than a year against the American government, which accuses it of stifling competition in online advertising.