Google has won a €1.49bn (£1.26bn) fine from the European Union for blocking rivals’ online search ads.
The EU accused Google of abusing its market dominance between 2006 and 2016 by restricting third-party competitors from showing search ads.
Europe’s second highest court ruled that the European Commission, which levied the fine, “made an error in its assessment”.
The Commission said it would “consider possible next steps”, which could include an appeal to the EU’s top court.
Google welcomed the ruling: “We are pleased that the court recognized the error of the original decision and vacated the fine,” the company said in a statement.
The company added: “We will review the entire decision carefully.”
It is a rare victory for the tech giant, which was fined a total of 8.2 billion euros for antitrust violations between 2017 and 2019.
But it fails One of those fines was rescinded last week.
The company is not only under pressure in Europe for its lucrative ad technology business.
Earlier this month, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) Temporarily determined that it used anti-competitive behavior Occupy the market.
this The US government also took tech giants to court On the same issue, prosecutors accused its parent company Alphabet of illegally monopolizing the market.
Alphabet argues that its market dominance stems from the effectiveness of its products.
The case revolves around Google’s AdSense product, which delivers ads to websites – making Google almost an ad broker.
The Commission concluded that Google abused its dominant position by preventing websites from using brokers other than AdSense when finding ads for their pages.
The company then allegedly added additional “restrictive” clauses to the contract to reinforce its market dominance, leading to a €1.49 billion fine.
The General Court of the European Union upheld most of the Commission’s decisions but reversed the Commission’s decision to impose a fine.
It was claimed that the Commission had failed to consider “all relevant circumstances” regarding the terms of the contract and how the market was defined.
Therefore, the Commission ruled that the conduct did not constitute an abuse of a dominant market position.
