Google scores rare legal win as 1.49bn euro fine scrapped

Google has won its challenge against a €1.49bn (£1.26bn) fine from the EU for blocking rival online search advertisers.

The bloc accused Google of abusing its market dominance by restricting third-party rivals from displaying search ads between 2006 and 2016.

Europe’s second-top court ruled the European Commission – which levied the fine – “committed errors in its assessment”.

The Commission said it would “reflect on possible next steps”, which could include an appeal to the EU’s top court.

Google welcomed the ruling: “We are pleased that the court has recognised errors in the original decision and annulled the fine,” it said in a statement.

“We will review the full decision closely,” it added.

It is a rare win for the tech giant, which was hit with fines worth a total of 8.2 billion euros between 2017 and 2019 over antitrust violations.

It failed in its attempt to have one of those fines overturned last week.

It is not just in under Europe where it is under pressure over its highly lucrative ad tech business.

Earlier this month, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) provisionally found it used anti-competitive practices to dominate the market.

The US government is also taking the tech giant to court over the same issue, with prosecutors alleging its parent company, Alphabet, illegally operates a monopoly in the market.

Alphabet has argued its market dominance is due to the effectiveness of its products.

This case revolved around Google’s AdSense product, which delivers adverts to websites – making Google almost like a broker for ads.

The Commission concluded Google had abused its dominance to prevent websites from using brokers other than AdSense when they were seeking adverts for their web pages.

It said the firm then added other “restrictive” clauses to its contracts to reinforce its market dominance – and levied a €1.49bn fine as a penalty.

In its ruling, the EU’s General Court upheld the majority of the Commission’s findings – but annulled the decision by which the Commission imposed the fine

It said the Commission had not considered “all the relevant circumstances” concerning the contract clauses and how it defined the market.

Because of this, it ruled the Commission did not establish “an abuse of dominant position.”