Google won a legal victory in the Court of Justice of the European Union on Wednesday, avoiding a fine of €1.49 billion. The case concerned allegations that the tech giant had abused its dominance in the advertising market.
In 2019, the European Commission accused Google of abusing its market dominance by preventing websites from using ad brokers other than its own platform, AdSense, which handles search ads. According to the Commission, these practices took place between 2006 and 2016.
At Wednesday’s hearing in the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg, the court agreed that Google had abused its dominance. Nevertheless, it annulled the fine, finding that the Commission had not sufficiently taken into account all relevant circumstances.
“The Commission has also not demonstrated that the clauses in question had, first, possibly deterred innovation, next, helped Google to maintain and strengthen its dominant position on the national markets for online search advertising at issue and, last, that they had possibly harmed consumers”, the judges ruled, according to Reuters.
Meanwhile, Google was recently ordered by the European Court of Justice to pay a fine of €2.4 billion in a separate case where it was found to have illegally promoted its own products on the market.
The European Commission will now review the ruling and consider a possible appeal against the decision.
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