Google Loses EU Court Fight Over €2.4 Billion Antitrust Fine

(Bloomberg) -- Google lost its bid to topple a once-record €2.4 billion ($2.6 billion) European Union fine for abusing its monopoly power to crush rival shopping services. 

The EU’s Court of Justice in Luxembourg backed a landmark 2017 decision, which found the US tech giant illegally leveraged its search-engine dominance to give a higher ranking to its own product listings.

Margrethe Vestager — who is just weeks away from departing the Brussels-based institution after two terms as competition commissioner — made Alphabet Inc.’s Google a top target after taking up her role in 2014. One of her earliest acts was to intensify a case that had withered under her predecessor.

The focus on Google from the EU’s antitrust enforcers hasn’t merely targeted the firm’s search dominance. The shopping case was the first round in a trio of fines that led to penalties totaling more than €8 billion.

A Google spokesperson said that the company is “disappointed” with the court judgment and that a 2017 offer to remedy the EU’s concerns helped to generate more clicks for other shopping services. 

After the shopping case, the firm was hit in 2018 with a new record €4.3 billion fine for allegedly restrictive contract terms that prevented makers of tablets and phones from adding competing apps and web browsers, on Android-run devices. 

Less than a year later, the company came in for a €1.49 billion fine for thwarting advertising rivals through exclusivity agreements for online ads with its AdSense for Search product.

Crucially, the EU’s fourth and likely final assault on Google’s business under Vestager came with potentially the most perilous penalty. The Danish commissioner warned that the only way of remedying Google’s dominance in adtech would be to mandate the breakup of the firm’s business in the area — putting the EU’s regulators on a similar track as the US Department of Justice, which is seeking a similar breakup.

The EU’s competition watchdogs are hoping that Google’s conduct will be definitively fixed by sweeping new regulation that came into effect last year — the Digital Markets Act. 

Among other dos and don’ts — it forces Big Tech players to refrain from favoring their own services over rivals — an obligation inspired by the bloc’s near decade-long tussle with the tech giant’s search dominance.