Despite losing the lawsuit in the US Department of Justice, tech giant Google has won nearly 1.5 billion euros in an advertising antitrust case in the European Union.
On September 18th local time, according to foreign media reports, the General Court, the second highest court in Europe, made a ruling partially supporting Google's appeal against the European Commission for a total anti-monopoly fine of 1.49 billion euros (currently about 11.766 billion yuan), and Google will no longer need to pay this fine.
The Second High Court of the European Union stated, "The court upheld most of the European Commission's assessment, but revoked the decision to impose a fine of nearly 1.5 billion euros on Google because the Commission did not take into account all relevant circumstances when assessing the duration of the unfair contract terms found by Google
The EU's investigation into Google AdSense advertising service began in 2016. In March 2019, the European Commission announced an anti-monopoly fine of 1.49 billion euros on Google AdSense advertising service, accusing it of restricting competitors in the online search advertising market. At the time, the European Commission stated in a statement that "Google abused its market dominance by imposing restrictive clauses in contracts with third-party websites to prevent Google's competitors from placing search ads on these websites
In June 2019, Google appealed the ruling. Five years later, the court upheld most of the European Commission's assessment but revoked nearly 1.5 billion euros in fines.
However, this is just one of the three antitrust lawsuits Google is facing in the European Union. Previously, the EU also imposed anti-monopoly fines on Google Shopping and Google's Android operating system, with a total of 8.25 billion euros (currently about 65.148 billion yuan) in three anti-monopoly fines.
Google has also appealed against these two cases. But just a week ago, on September 10th, the European Court of Justice announced the maintenance of the EU's fine against Google Shopping, imposing a fine of 2.4 billion euros on Google. According to the 2017 ruling, Google was found to have illegally exploited its dominant position in the search engine field to provide higher search rankings for its own products and suppress competitors' shopping services. As the final ruling of the court, Google cannot appeal this case again.
The antitrust challenges faced by Google are not only from the European Union. On September 9th local time, the Federal Court of Northern Virginia in the United States opened the case of the Department of Justice v. Google for illegally monopolizing the digital advertising industry. The US Department of Justice accuses Google of establishing a monopoly in the market for digital advertising technology by acquiring advertising technology providers such as DoubleClick and AdMeld, causing harm to news publishers and other website owners.
In August of this year, a federal judge in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia just announced a ruling that Google's search business violated US antitrust laws, stating that Google maintained a monopoly position in the two major markets of general search services and general text advertising through exclusive distribution agreements signed with browser developers, smartphone manufacturers, and wireless operators. This case became the first antitrust judgment against a technology giant in the Internet era. Federal judges will impose penalties on Google before August 2025, and Google has stated that it will appeal the ruling.