Google wins its court case, and avoids a EUR1,49 billion fine for anti-competitive behavior

In the far-off world of Silicon Valley, billions and millions are nothing more than chump changes. Google is likely to be pleased that a European court has overturned a fine, less because the money was involved and more because the message.

Alphabet's tech giant, Alphabet, has just won an appeal against a previous European Commission court ruling. The fine of EUR1,49 billion was overturned (via BBC). The fine was imposed by the EC in 2019 for "violating EU antitrust laws".

The original EC ruling essentially claimed Google abused its dominant position by making it difficult to advertise effectively on search results pages of websites owned by publishers who had contracts with Google.

In 2019, the EC reported that "Google first imposed a supply exclusivity obligation, which prohibited competitors from placing any ads on the most important websites for commercial reasons." Google then introduced its "relaxed exclusiveness" strategy, which was designed to reserve the most valuable positions for its search ads and control the performance of competing adverts.

The General Court of Europe, Europe's second highest court, has now annulled 2019's fine. The General Court, Europe's second-highest court, has now annulled the 2019 fine.

Google has good news, but there are still billions of dollars in fines to pay. Google, for example, failed to get a EUR2.4 billion fine overturned a little over a week earlier.

Last month, a US judge ruled that Google violated antitrust laws (anticompetitive exclusive deals). Recently, the DoJ filed a complaint about Google's "systematic campaign to seize the control of a wide range of high-tech tools, used by publishers and advertisers to facilitate digital advertising."

This EUR1,49 billion fine is unlikely to be at the core of Google's concerns, given other fines and US cases. I can't but suspect that a few billions here and there don't matter much in Google's universe. One can only imagine what it would be like to be a technology giant in 2024.