Alphabet unit Google won a legal challenge on Wednesday against a 1.49 billion euro ($1.7 billion) European Union antitrust fine, while Qualcomm failed to repeal a penalty, Reuters reported.
The rulings underscore outgoing EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager’s mixed record in defending her crackdown on Big Tech in court. She scored two major wins last week against Google in a separate case and against Apple’s tax deal with Irish authorities.
The European Commission in its 2019 decision said Google had abused its dominance to prevent websites from using brokers other than it’s AdSense platform that provided search adverts. The practices it said were illegal took place from 2006 to 2016.
The Luxembourg-based General Court mostly agreed with the European Union competition enforcer’s assessments of the case, but annulled the fine, saying that the Commission had failed to take into account all the relevant circumstances.
According to Reuters, the AdSense fine, one of a trio of fines that have cost Google at total of 8.25 billion euros, was triggered by a complaint by Microsoft in 2010.
CNBC reported The European Union’s second-highest court on Wednesday said a 1.5 billion euro ($1.7 billion) fine imposed on Google by regulators should be annulled, siding with the U.S. tech giant after it challenged the ruling.
The case stems from 2019 when the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said Alphabet owned Google had abused its market dominance in relation to a product called AdSense for Search. This product allowed website owners to deliver ads into the search results on their own pages.
Google acts as an intermediary allowing advertisers to serve ads via search on third-party websites.
But the commission alleged that Google abused its market dominance by imposing a number of restrictive clauses in contracts with third-party websites, which ultimately prevented rivals from placing their search ads on these websites.
The commission fined Google 1.49 billion euros at the time. Google appeals, sending the case to the EU’s General Court.
The General Court said Wednesday that it “upholds the majority of the findings” but “annuls the decision by which the Commission imposed a fine of” nearly 1.5 billion euros.
The court added that the commission “failed to take into consideration all the relevant circumstances in its assessment of the duration of the contract clauses” that it had deemed abusive.
TechCrunch reported Google has succeeded in overturning a $1.7 billion antitrust penalty handed down by the European Union back in March 2019.
The €1.49 billion fine, which Google appealed, was originally issued after the European Commission found the tech giant’s search ads brokering business had violated competition rules between 2006 and 2016 to cement a dominant position.
On Wednesday, the EU’s General Court upheld the majority of EU’s findings, but annulled the earlier decision in its entirety after finding that the Commission had failed to take into consideration all the relevant circumstances when assessing the duration of the contract clauses it deemed abusive.
In my opinion, this is an unexpected win for Google. It is unclear to me why EU’s General Court decided to overturn it’s previous decisions regarding Google’s AdSense.