Google has succeeded in overturning a $1.7 billion antitrust penalty handed down by the European Union back in March 2019.
The €1.49 billion fine, which Google appealed, was originally issued after the European Commission found the tech giant’s search ads brokering business had violated competition rules between 2006 and 2016 to cement a dominant position.
On Wednesday, the EU’s General Court upheld the majority of EU’s findings, but annulled the earlier decision in its entirety after finding that the Commission had failed to take into consideration all the relevant circumstances when assessing the duration of the contract clauses it deemed abusive.
The EU can appeal the decision to the bloc’s highest court, the Court of Justice (CJEU), on a point of law. But it has yet to confirm whether it will do so. Commission spokeswoman Lea Zuber told TechCrunch that it “takes note” of the General Court judgment and said it will study it “carefully” and “reflect on possible next steps.”
The new decision comes after the bloc netted a couple of major wins at the CJEU, one of which touched another Google decision (Google Shopping). The Commission also won the higher court’s backing for a high-risk State Aid case against Ireland’s tax breaks for Apple, confirming the tech giant must pay some $15B in back taxes. So the EU may be feeling emboldened to try its luck at challenging this latest court setback, especially as the General Court upheld most of its findings in the AdSense case.
Google has been contacted for a response to the General Court’s ruling.
The Commission hasn’t stood still since the AdSense decision, as it has an ongoing investigation into Google’s adtech stack, instigated back in mid 2021, that’s looking more broadly at its role in the adtech supply chain.
It remains to be seen whether that antitrust probe will lead to enforcement, but the Commission’s competition chief previously warned that if its concerns are confirmed, the only viable remedy may be to break Google’s ad empire up.
EU’s Qualcomm penalty largely upheld
In a separate ruling also issued on Wednesday, the General Court largely upheld a July 2019 Commission antitrust penalty on Qualcomm that had fined the mobile chipmaker €242 million (~$271M) for predatory pricing of baseband chips.
Qualcomm petitioned the General Court to annul the fine entirely or substantially reduce it. The Court largely upheld the Commission’s penalty, only slightly revising the fine down to €238.7M.
The chipmaker had raised 15 pleas in law challenging the EU’s penalty. The General Court rejected all of them except one concerning the fee calculation, which it accepted partially, finding that the Commission “departed, without justification, from the methodology laid down in its 2006 guidelines [for calculating fees].”
The ruling is likely to be a big relief for the Commission, which had an earlier Qualcomm enforcement quashed by the General Court in 2022.
The legal avenues for Qualcomm to challenge the Court’s latest ruling are limited to raising a point of law with the CJEU.