Google suffered a setback on Thursday as an adviser to Europe's top court faulted a lower tribunal's decision to scrap a 1.49 billion euro ($1.7 billion) fine levied against the U.S. tech giant seven years ago for anti-competitive practices in online advertising.
Advocate General Juliane Kokott told the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union that the General Court was wrong to annul the fine in September 2024, and proposed that the court set aside that judgment and send the case back for a fresh ruling. The case is formally C-826/24 P, European Commission v Google and Alphabet.
The European Commission imposed the fine in March 2019 after finding that Google had abused its dominant position through restrictive clauses in contracts with publishers using its AdSense for Search service. The clauses, applied between 2006 and 2016, limited or prevented publishers from displaying advertisements from competing search advertising services on their websites, reinforcing Google's dominance in online search advertising.
Kokott said the General Court had imposed excessive requirements on the examination of the duration of the practices and had not sufficiently related its conclusion to the criteria determining whether a company holds a dominant position. She recommended that the judges reject the annulment and return the case to the lower court.
The opinion is not binding, and the fine would not automatically come back into force even if the judges follow it: the case would return to the General Court, and Kokott also suggested the amount should be reduced, since the tribunal's findings on the lack of exclusionary effects in 2016 were not challenged. The Court of Justice, which usually follows the majority of such recommendations, is expected to rule in 2027. A Google spokesperson said the company is reviewing the opinion.
The AdSense fine was one of six EU antitrust penalties that have cost Google 10.38 billion euros over nearly two decades, and the only one a court ever threw out.
