The European Union has fined Google €1.49bn for breaching antitrust rules related to search advertising with its ad tool, AdSense, saying Google used its dominant position to prevent rivals from using this tool on third-party websites.
European Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager, announced the EU’s third big anti-trust fine against the tech giant for imposing restrictive clauses in contracts with third-party websites, preventing Google rivals from placing their search adverts on these third-party sites.
“Google has cemented its dominance in online search adverts and shielded itself from competitive pressure by imposing anti-competitive contractual restrictions on third-party websites,” said Vestager. She continued, “This is illegal under EU antitrust rules. The misconduct lasted over 10 years and denied other companies the possibility to compete on the merits and to innovate.”
This AdSense anti-trust fine is just the latest in a series of fines levied by the EU against Google; the first €2.4bn fine was handed out in 2017 for favoring its own shopping services over competitors. And last year Google was hit with a €4.34bn fine for using its market power to block rivals in areas such as internet browsing.
In response to the fine, Google’s Senior Vice President of Global Affairs, Kent Walker, said the following, “We’ve always agreed that healthy, thriving markets are in everyone’s interest. We’ve already made a wide range of changes to our products to address the Commission’s concerns. Over the next few months, we’ll be making further updates to give more visibility to rivals in Europe.”
While this marks the end of the three big anti-trust investigations the EU was conducting over Google, in a press conference, Vestager said that while Google has made adjustments after the other anti-trust cases to ensure fairer operations, she didn’t want to rule out the possibility of taking the company to task over future violations.
Google has denied the charges in the past, and is still appealing the first two fines imposed on them in 2017 and 2018, and it is likely that they will follow suit and appeal this fine.
