In a decision handed down on Wednesday 18 September, the General Court of the European Union annulled the fine of €1.49 billion imposed by Brussels on Google in March 2019 for abuse of a dominant position in online advertising (Case T-334/19).
“The General Court annuls the Commission’s decision in its entirety”, states a press release, adding that “the institution committed errors in its assessment”.
The Commission “failed to take into consideration all the relevant circumstances in its assessment of the duration of the contract clauses that the Commission had deemed abusive”, the Court ruled.
At the heart of the dispute is Google’s AdSense service and its online advertising intermediation service called AdSense for Search (“AFS”).
This could be used by certain online sites to display advertisements linked to queries that users could submit on those websites. In this way, publishers could receive part of the revenue generated by the display of these ads.
However, after receiving several complaints between 2010 and 2017, the Commission found that the AFS clauses restricting or prohibiting the display of advertisements from competing services constituted an abuse of a dominant position.
The Commission then found that Google had committed three separate infringements constituting, together, a single and continuous infringement, from January 2006 to September 2016, and fined Google €1.49 billion.
The General Court today concluded that “the Commission has not established that the three clauses that it had identified each constituted an abuse of a dominant position and together constituted a single and continuous infringement. (...) In particular, the General Court finds that the Commission has not demonstrated that the clauses in question had been capable of deterring publishers from sourcing from Google’s competing intermediaries or that they had been capable of preventing those competitors from accessing a significant part of the market for (...) search advertising”.
This is a welcome decision for Google, after the CJEU last week upheld a €2.42 billion fine imposed in 2017 for abusing its dominant position by favouring its own price comparison service (see EUROPE 13479/2).
See the press release: https://aeur.eu/f/dgz (Original version in French by Isalia Stieffatre)