In 2019, the corporation was penalized monetarily for including anti-competitive exclusivity restrictions in the advertising contracts it had signed.
It is possible that the number of fines that Google is required to pay in Europe has reached a somewhat lower level. It has been successful in persuading the General Court of the European Union to overturn the penalty of €1.5 billion ($1.7 billion) that was imposed against it in 2019 for what the European Commission referred to as “abusive practices in online advertising.” According to the Financial Times, the General Court concurred with the commission’s conclusion that Google did, in fact, prevent competitors from advertising on its platform. On the other hand, it argued that the commission did not take into account “all the relevant circumstances” when it evaluated the length of time that the corporation had been engaging in anti-competitive actions.
The commission, which was led by Margrethe Vestager and was responsible for competition, discovered in 2019 that Google had barred publishers from placing search advertisements from competitors on its search results pages between the years 2006 and 2009. In 2009, it made some minor adjustments to its rules, but it wasn’t until 2016 that it deleted the phrase in its contracts that was related to the restriction. The commission stated that it took into consideration “the duration and gravity of the infringement,” which resulted in the fine being significantly more than what was anticipated for this particular instance.
“This case is about a very narrow subset of text-only search ads placed on a limited number of publishers’ websites,” Google stated in a statement to the Financial Times. “This case is about a comparatively small number of publishers.” Even before to the commission’s judgment, we made modifications to our contracts in 2016 in order to remove the elements that were pertinent to the situation. We are relieved that the court has acknowledged that the initial ruling contained errors and has therefore decided to overturn the fine. The complete decision will be scrutinized in great detail. While this was going on, the commission stated to the magazine that it “will carefully study the judgment and reflect on possible next steps.” However, it is still able to appeal the decision of the court.
Over the course of the previous few years, the European Commission has levied a number of antitrust fines against Google, and this particular fine is just one of them. At the beginning of this month, the highest court in the European Union upheld a different penalty against the business that was $2.7 billion. In 2017, the commission decided to levy the fine against Google because it discovered that the business had “abused its market dominance as a search engine by promoting its own comparison shopping service in its search results and demoting those of competitors.” Vestager noted that this was the reason for the commission’s decision.
Within the next several weeks, Vestager will be resigning from her position as the commissioner for competition for the European Union. The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a rule that was created as a result of the market abuse cases that she has filed over the years. The DMA is a regulation that is intended to prohibit the largest participants in the industry from abusing their market dominance. Throughout her tenure, she has been a particularly harsh critic of huge technology businesses.