The European Court of Justice annulled, on Wednesday, September 18, a fine of 1.5 billion euros imposed by Brussels in 2019 on Google for abuse of a dominant position in online advertising. The Court of the European Union, which rules at first instance, announces that it “annuls the Commission’s decision in its entirety”considering that the European executive has “made mistakes” in its assessment. The European Commission will have the possibility to appeal this decision.
The case concerns the advertising network Google AdSense. In March 2019, the Commission had 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 take legal action and won its case on Wednesday.
In its judgment, the court located in Luxembourg “confirms most of the Commission's assessments”but cancels the fine “on the grounds in particular that it failed to take into consideration all the relevant circumstances in its assessment of the duration of the contractual clauses which it had described as unfair”.
According to the Commission, the infringement was observed over a period of ten years between 2006 and 2016, the year in which it opened its investigation following an initial customer complaint dating back to 2010. As early as September 2016, Google had removed certain clauses from its contracts in order to comply.
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This first instance judgment comes just eight days after the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) definitively upheld 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 EU's highest court ruled that Google had for years made competitors to its Google Shopping service virtually invisible to consumers.
In total, the large Californian group 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.
Source: Lemonde
