Google won a court fight with the European Union over a Euro 1.5 billion ($1.7 billion) fine for thwarting competition for online ads, partly atoning for last week’s crushing defeat in a separate judgment for abusing its monopoly powers.
Judges at the EU’s General Court in Luxembourg backed the Alphabet Inc. unit’s challenge to a fine doled out in 2019, saying regulators made mistakes in their probe.
The European Commission had alleged that Google — as a dominant online ad broker — illegally prevented rivals such as Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. from placing ads on third-party websites. Wednesday’s ruling can still be appealed at the bloc’s top tribunal, the Court of Justice. The decision comes on the heels of two court successes for antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager and her bid to rein in Silicon Valley. Last week she won victories at the top court against Google’s attempt to avoid a Euro 2.4 billion antitrust penalty for favoring its own product results on search and Apple Inc.’s bid to skirt a Euro 13 billion Irish tax bill.
The EU’s case into Google 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.
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 Euro 1.49 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.
Despite confirming most of the EU’s reasoning, 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.