Google Wins Court Bid Against EU's EUR 1.5 Bln Atitrust Fine Over AdSense

(RTTNews) - Google, owned by Alphabet Inc., won a legal fight with the European Union over a 1.5 billion euros or $1.7 billion antitrust fine over online ads search. The General Court, the second-highest EU court, has ruled to annul the fine imposed by the European Commission against the search engine for allegedly abusing market dominance in relation to a product called AdSense for Search.

The Commission could appeal the ruling at EU's top court, European Court of Justice or ECJ.

The favorable ruling comes after the company's last week's defeat in a separate judgment in the EU by ECJ, upholding a 2.4 billion euros fine, for abusing its monopoly powers.

In the latest verdict, the General Court in Luxembourg stated that it upholds the majority of the findings by the EU regulators, but annuls the decision by the Commission of imposing the fine. According to the court, the EU regulators were mostly correct in their findings, but made key mistakes in their investigation as it failed to take into consideration all the relevant circumstances in its assessment of the duration of the contract clauses that it had deemed abusive.

The issues with EU over AdSense started in 2019, when the Commission imposed the fine saying that the search giant had abused its market dominance related to the ad product, which allowed website owners to deliver ads into the search results on their own pages. In this, Google acts as an intermediary allowing advertisers to serve ads through search on third-party websites.

Meanwhile, the Commission alleged that the company imposed a number of restrictive clauses in contracts with third-party websites. This ultimately prevented others from placing their search ads on these websites, thus resulting in market dominance.

The Commission then fined Google, which appealed the case to the EU's General Court.

CNBC now quoted a Google spokesperson as saying, "This case is about a very narrow subset of text-only search ads placed on a limited number of publishers' websites. We made changes to our contracts in 2016 to remove the relevant provisions, even before the Commission's decision. We are pleased that the court has recognized errors in the original decision and annulled the fine."

Earlier this month, the ECJ dismissed an appeal lodged by Google and Alphabet, and upheld a 2.4 billion euros or $2.65 billion antitrust fine imposed by the Commission on Google for abuse of its dominant position by favouring its own comparison shopping service. Alphabet, as Google's sole shareholder, was jointly and severally liable to the tune of 523.52 million euros.

In other developments, UK's Competition and Markets Authority or CMA last week announced that it has provisionally found that Google has abused its dominant positions through the operation of both its publisher ad server and buying tools to restrict competition in the country.

The US Department of Justice and the European Commission have also opened separate probes into Google's activities in ad tech. These proceedings are ongoing.