Judge rejects Google’s appeal against EC fine of €4.3bn

Google today lost an appeal to the European Court of General Jurisdiction against the European Commission’s 2018 decision to fine the company a record €4.3 billion for violating European antitrust law. Court agreed with the European Commission that Google exploited its search engine’s dominance in the European Union (EU). However, the court decided only to reduce the amount of the fine by 5% due to a difference of opinion with the European Commission on one of the points.

Recall that in July 2018 the European Commission fined Google for €4.3 billion for violating antitrust laws. In particular, the European Commission accused Google of forcing Android smartphone manufacturers to pre-install Google services and applications, such as the search engine and Chrome browser, as a condition for access to the Google Play app store.

In addition, Google was accused of paying bribes to mobile operators and smartphone manufacturers so that they only pre-install the Google search engine, as well as that the company forbade gadget manufacturers to use operating systems based on the open source Android. Google filed an appeal, saying that in this case it is acting like countless other companies and that such terms allow it to keep Android as a free operating system.

However, the court sided with the European Commission in a significant part of the accusation. As noted in today’s decision, the court “generally upholds the European Commission’s decision that Google imposed unlawful restrictions on manufacturers of Android mobile devices and mobile network operators in order to strengthen the dominant position of its search engine.” But the court struck out a clause that accused Google of violating antitrust laws for paying manufacturers under total revenue-sharing agreements to pre-install only Google’s search engine.

Due to the removal of this clause, the amount of the fine has been reduced by 5% to €4.12. Nevertheless, this fine remains a record high for similar cases. Google can still challenge this decision in the Court of Justice of the European Union, the EU’s highest court.

Alena Miklashevskaya