EU Court overturns everything: Google will not pay
In 2019, the European Commission fined Google €1.5 billion for abuse of a dominant positioning. It criticized clauses in advertising contracts. The EU court has just annulled everything.
Google will save €1.5 billion. This was the sum claimed by the European Commission for abuse of a dominant positioning in online advertising. The European commissioners had deemed the clauses in Google AdSense contracts to be too restrictive. Suddenly, the EU court, based in Luxembourg, decided to annul everything. The judges considered that the Commission had made “assessment errors”. It can obviously appeal the decision of this judgment, which is linked to the legal action that Google had initiated after the 2019 decision.
Other sanctions
On the other hand, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) was not as lenient. A week ago, it definitively confirmed another fine against Google for anti-competitive practices in the price comparison market. The amount to be paid is €2.4 billion, to which a fine of €4.1 billion could be added for its Android operating system. Since Google has appealed the latter, the EU justice system will also have to decide whether or not to cancel it.
(MH with Olivier Duquesne – Source: Le Soir – Picture: © Wikipédia - Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license - Noah_Loverbear)