Google wins appeal over EU online advertising competition fine

In a ruling issued on Wednesday, the EU General Court said the European Commission’s decision to impose the fine on Google in 2019 should be annulled on the basis of failings in the Commission’s assessment of contractual clauses publishers were asked to sign up to when taking advantage of Google’s 'AdSense for Search' service.

AdSense for Search enables online businesses to display adverts delivered by Google alongside search results they present to users on their websites.

The Commission had determined that contracts for AdSense for Search initially prevented Google's competitors from "placing any search adverts on the commercially most significant websites", and latterly reserved "the most valuable positions" for its own search adverts. It said Google unfairly constrained the ability of its rivals in the online search advertising market to display adverts for their services alongside search results embedded on the websites of online publishers.

The Commission identified three separate infringements of EU competition law that it considered Google responsible for but held that those infringements constituted a single and continuous infringement, spanning a period from January 2006 to September 2016. However, the General Court has now held that the Commission did not establish that any of the three alleged infringements in question constituted an abuse of a dominant market position by Google in their own right. The court further said the Commission had not properly demonstrated why each of the separate alleged infringements should be categorised as a single and continuous infringement. As a result, the court said the Commission’s decision should be annulled.

It is open to the European Commission to raise an appeal against the General Court’s decision to the EU’s highest court, the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU).