Google scores surprise court win on EU antitrust fine

Google overturned a €1.5 billion European Union antitrust fine at the General Court, a rare loss for Margrethe Vestager who’s beaten back previous Big Tech challenges.

Judges said the European Commission “made errors in its assessment” of the duration of Google’s advertising contracts with publishers and what they covered. As a result, investigators hadn’t established that Google’s clauses meant that the company was abusing its dominant position.

“The General Court holds that the Commission has also not demonstrated that the clauses in question had, first, possibly deterred innovation, next, helped Google to maintain and strengthen its dominant position on the national markets for online search advertising at issue and, last, that they had possibly harmed consumers,” the tribunal said in a press release.

The 2019 fine, the third for Google coming after multibillion penalties for its shopping search and Android mobile phone software, stemmed from complaints over online advertising contracts, including Axel Springer, the owner of POLITICO. Springer and other media groups are now suing Google for damages in a Dutch court.

The EU executive is now in the final stages of another probe into Google’s advertising technology where it has threatened a potential breakup of the company’s services.

The Commission had found that Google’s AdSense for Search contracts unfairly restricted publishers from changing how ads were displayed on their website or including rivals’ search ads.

The tech giant claimed the Commission’s verdict was “quasi-criminal” at a three-day hearing in 2022, saying the ruling was riddled with “material errors.”

Google hasn’t previously had much luck with judges in Luxembourg. It failed to turn over its first €2.4 billion EU fine earlier this month and has taken a challenge over its biggest penalty to date, a €4.3 billion fine, to the EU’s top court.

The search firm is also one of the main targets of the EU’s Digital Markets Act which forces the company to open up services to rivals. It currently faces two EU investigations for not complying with those rules.

The case is T-334/19 Google and Alphabet vs. Commission (Google AdSense for Search).