Google, EU court annuls 1.5 billion fine

Brussels – Counter-order: there can be no 1.5 billion fine on Google. The EU General Court annulled the Commission’s March 2019 decision for alleged “abusive practices in online advertising” through the commercial suggestion service Adsense. The Luxembourg judges explain in their judgment that the Commission “failed to take into consideration all the relevant circumstances in its assessment of the duration of the contract clauses that the Commission had deemed abusive.” The services of EU Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager, essentially got the manner of the reviews and assessments wrong.

The European Commission “committed errors in its assessment of the duration of the clauses at issue, as well as of the market covered by them in 2016.” For this reason, the accusatory and sanctioning framework is not sustainable. The bottom line is that the EU executive only inferred that Google may have distorted the single market when, in fact, the General Court believes that “the Commission did not establish” that the clauses in question were likely to discourage publishers from sourcing from intermediaries who were competitors of Google, nor that the clauses prevented competitors from gaining access to a significant part of the online search engine’s advertising intermediation market in the European Economic Area (EEA).

The dispute between Brussels and the Internet giant, therefore, continues. The Mountain View multinational won this round, but the Commission could appeal to the Court of Justice should the von der Leyen team decide to proceed with the case. There are two months to decide whether the US company won the confrontation in the courtroom or, instead, the 1.5 billion fine has just been put on hold.

English version by the Translation Service of Withub