Brussels (Belgium) (AFP) – The EU’s top court upheld Thursday a record 4.1 billion euro ($4.7 billion) fine the bloc slapped on Google for anti-competitive practices related to its Android operating system. The European Court of Justice dismissed the US tech giant’s second attempt to overturn the penalty imposed by the European Commission in 2018, which remains the EU’s highest ever antitrust fine. “The Court of Justice dismisses the appeal brought by Google and Alphabet…thereby confirming the penalty imposed on them,” the court said. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, was found jointly liable for part of the levy.
The commission, the 27-nation bloc’s antitrust regulator, had accused Google of abusing the popularity of its Android operating system to restrict competition. It alleged Google pressured phone makers using Android to pre-install its search engine and Google Chrome browser, essentially shutting out rivals, and ordered it to pay a 4.3-billion-euro fine. The findings were upheld in 2022 by the General Court, the EU’s second-highest. However, the Luxembourg-based body slightly reduced the levy to 4.1 billion euros, which is still the EU’s biggest ever.
Google filed a new challenge arguing before the bloc’s top court, the European Court of Justice, that the case was unfounded and that the sanction penalised innovation. In the first instance, the firm had pushed the case that the EU was unfairly blind to practices by Apple, which gives preference to its own services, such as Safari on iPhones. It also argued that customers were in no way forced to use its products on Android and that downloading competing apps was just a tap away.
However, the EU’s top court found the first instance verdict “did not err in law when assessing the anticompetitive effects of the pre-installation conditions laid down by the Android agreements”. It rejected all other legal arguments put forward by Google and ordered it to pay the commission’s legal costs. Google stated that the judgement failed “to recognise our significant investment to ensure Android remains open, interoperable and free.” A spokesperson for the company added, “In any event, we adapted our agreements to comply with the initial decision back in 2018 and we remain focused on continued innovation and openness for our users, partners and developers.”
The ruling did not come as a complete surprise. The EU top court’s adviser had recommended upholding the fine in an opinion in June last year, which described Google’s arguments as “ineffective.” Although not binding, such advice carries weight and is often followed by EU judges. European consumer group BEUC welcomed the ruling as “a big win for Europe” but added that faster action was needed to rein in “big tech firms undermining the chances of smaller companies to grow.”
“For years, Android users were steered towards Google search and the Chrome browser, leaving little room for alternatives to challenge, even those offering greater innovative solutions or better privacy settings,” said BEUC’s director-general Agustin Reyna. The case is one in a series pitting Google against Brussels. As part of a major push to target big tech abuses, the EU slapped the Mountain View company with fines worth a total of 8.2 billion euros between 2017 and 2019 over antitrust violations. This set off a series of long-running legal battles.
Brussels has since armed itself with a more powerful legal weapon known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA) to rein in tech giants. Rather than regulators discovering antitrust violations after probes lasting many years, the DMA gives businesses a list of what they can and cannot do online. Google is already the subject of several formal DMA probes and was hit with a massive 2.95 billion euro fine in September in another competition case predating the digital law for favouring its own advertising services. That drew an angry rebuke from US President Donald Trump, who has accused Brussels of unfairly targeting American firms and repeatedly threatened to impose retaliatory tariffs on EU exports.
© 2024 AFP
