Sept. 18 (UPI) — The European Union General Court on Wednesday annulled a $1.7 billion antitrust penalty levied by the European Commission against Google over its AdSense advertising platform.
The court upheld “the majority” of the European Commission’s initial findings but annuled the fine, stating that the Commission”failed to take into consideration all the relevant circumstances in its assessment of the duration of the contract clauses that the Commission had deemed abusive.”
A Google spokesperson told CNBC the company will closely review the decision.
“This case is about a very narrow subset of text-only search ads placed on a limited number of publishers’ websites,” the Google spokesperson said. “We made changes to our contracts in 2016 to remove the relevant provisions, even before the Commission’s decision. We are pleased that the court has recognized errors in the original decision and annulled the fine.”
The European Commission found in March 2019 that Google had committed three separate infringements of European competition laws related to three clauses in Google’s Services Agreement.
The Commission found that the clauses could prevent services from competing with Google’s advertising intermediation service called AdSense for Search.
Google acts as an intermediary for ads on third-party websites.
According to the General Court, the GSAs contained clauses restricting or prohibiting the display of ads from services competing with AFS.
“The General Court, after having upheld the majority of the Commission’s findings, concludes that that institution committed errors in its assessment of the duration of the clauses at issue, as well as of the market covered by them in 2016,” the General Court said in a statement. “The Commission has not established that the three clauses that it had identified each constituted an abuse of a dominant position and together constituted a single and continuous infringement of Article 102 TFEU. The General Court annuls the Commission’s decision in its entirety.”
The court said the Commission failed to take into consideration all the relevant circumstances of the case.
The Commission has the right to appeal and said it will review the decision for possible next steps.