The EU’s General Court said regulators made key mistakes in their probe linked to the duration of the alleged wrongdoing
The EU’s case into Google’s AdSense service is the last of a trilogy of court disputes over cases that set the course for Vestager’s tenure, which is about to end after a decade.
Alphabet shares rose 0.2 per cent at 9:41 a.m. in New York.
EU regulators targeted Google’s role as an ad broker for websites, where the AdSense for Search product placed advertising on platforms including newspaper websites, blogs and travel sites.
When the Brussels watchdog hit Google with the €1.5 billion penalty in 2019, it said Google’s contracts with websites prevented them from accepting rival search ads from the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo. When a user would input a query on a Google search box on websites, ads from such rivals were blocked. The problematic contracts were all dropped by 2016, when the EU escalated the investigation.
EU mistakes
Despite confirming “the majority of the commission’s findings,” judges in Wednesday’s ruling said that regulators blundered in their assessment of the duration of the disputed clauses, as well as the part of the market covered by them during 2016.
The EU commission “has not established that the three clauses it had identified each constituted an abuse of a dominant position and, together, a single and continuous infringement” of antitrust rules, the court said.
In a hearing two years ago, Google’s lawyers described the EU’s 2019 penalty as representing a “quasi criminal fine of very large proportions.”
Mountain View, California-based Google said on Wednesday it’s “pleased that the court has recognized errors in the original decision and annulled the fine. We will review the full decision closely.”
“This case is about a very narrow subset of text-only search ads placed on a limited number of publishers’ websites,” the company said. “We made changes to our contracts in 2016 to remove the relevant provisions, even before the commission’s decision.”
The Brussels-based commission said it “will carefully study the judgment and reflect on possible next steps.”
The EU’s Google cases marked the centerpiece of Vestager’s efforts to crack down on the growing power of big tech companies. She’s fined the Alphabet unit more than €8 billion to date and has also launched a fourth case into Google’s advertising technology business, suggesting that the firm needs to be broken up to allay antitrust concerns. A final decision in that probe is pending.