Google was given a $1.7 billion antitrust fine by the European Union in March 2019, but they were able to get it thrown out.
The tech giant was fined €1.49 billion by the European Commission because its search ads brokering business broke competition rules from 2006 to 2016 to gain a strong position. Google then filed an appeal.
The EU’s General Court upheld most of the EU’s findings on Wednesday, but threw out the earlier decision in its entirety because the Commission hadn’t taken into account all the relevant circumstances when judging the duration of the contract terms it found to be abusive.
On a point of law, the EU can take the decision to the Court of Justice (CJEU), which is the top court in the bloc. But it hasn’t said for sure yet if it will do that. Parhlo World spokesman for the Commission, Lea Zuber, said that the Commission “takes note” of the General Court’s decision and will “carefully study” it and “think about possible next steps.”
A few big wins for the group at the CJEU led to the new decision. One of those wins affected another Google decision (Google Shopping). The Commission also got the higher court to support a case against Ireland’s tax breaks for Apple, which was very risky. This confirmed that the tech giant needs to pay about $15B in back taxes. It’s possible that the EU feels more confident about going after this new court decision, since the General Court upheld most of its decisions in the AdSense case.
Google has been asked to comment on the General Court’s decision.
The Commission hasn’t done nothing since the AdSense decision. It started an investigation into Google’s adtech stack in the middle of 2021 and is still going on. This investigation looks at Google’s role in the adtech supply chain in a broader way.
We still don’t know if the antitrust investigation will lead to enforcement, but the head of competition at the European Commission has said that if its worries are proven to be correct, the only way to fix the problem might be to break up Google’s ad empire.
EU’s Qualcomm Fine Mostly Confirmed
In a separate decision made on Wednesday, the General Court mostly supported an antitrust fine that the Commission had given Qualcomm in July 2019 for charging too much for baseband chips. The fine was €242 million (~$271M).
Qualcomm asked the General Court to either throw out the fine completely or cut it down a lot. The Court mostly agreed with the Commission’s punishment and only slightly lowered the fine to €238.7M.
The chipmaker had filed 15 legal challenges to the EU’s punishment. The General Court turned down all of them except the one about figuring out fees, which it partly accepted because the Commission “departed, without justification, from the methodology laid out in its 2006 guidelines [for figuring fees].”
This decision is expected to be very good news for the Commission. In 2022, the General Court threw out an earlier enforcement against Qualcomm.
Also Read: Antitrust Claims Have Been Brought Against Google in the Uk for “self-preferencing” Its Ad Exchange
Qualcomm can only question the Court’s most recent decision by bringing up a point of law with the CJEU.
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