Google finally wins a court case and gets out of a €1.49 billion fine over anti-competitive practices

In the distant world of Silicon Valley funny-money, millions are peanuts and billions are little more than chump change. Google’s therefore likely to be happy about the fact that it’s just had a fine overturned by a European court less because of the money and more because of the message.

The Alphabet-owned tech giant has just won its appeal against a previous European Commission (EC) court ruling and had its €1.49 billion fine overturned (via the BBC). The fine in question was ruled on by the EC back in 2019 and was levied against Google for “breaching EU antitrust rules”.

The original EC ruling essentially claimed that Google abused its market dominance by making it difficult for competitors to advertise effectively on the search results pages for websites owned by publishers that had contracts with Google.

Back in 2019, the EC stated, “Google first imposed an exclusive supply obligation, which prevented competitors from placing any search adverts on the commercially most significant websites. Then, Google introduced what it called its “relaxed exclusivity” strategy aimed at reserving for its own search adverts the most valuable positions and at controlling competing adverts’ performance.”

Europe’s second-highest court, the General Court, has now annulled the 2019 fine. While this court reportedly agreed with most of the EC’s findings, the judges stated (via Reuters) that the EC had “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.”

Good news for Google, then, but it’s good news amidst the bad, considering the company is still facing billions-worth of fines. Little over a week ago, for instance, Google failed to have a different €2.4 billion fine overturned. 

On the same issue as this overturned fine (anticompetitive exclusivity deals), last month a US Judge ruled that Google had violated antitrust laws, and recently the DoJ has filed a complaint against Google for “engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising.”

Given other fines and these US cases, this €1.49 billion fine was unlikely to be the crux of Google’s concerns. I can’t help but suspect a few billion here or there matters little in Google’s world. Oh, to be a tech giant in 2024—one can only dream.

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