The European Court of Justice has annulled a €1.5 billion fine imposed on Google by the European Commission.
Judges said the EU had “failed to take into consideration all the relevant circumstances” before imposing the fine.
In 2019, the European Commission fined Google €1.49 billion claiming the company had “abused its market dominance by imposing a number of restrictive clauses in contracts with third-party websites which prevented Google’s rivals from placing their search adverts on these websites.”
The Court of Justice of the European Union’s General Court now says that although it agrees with “the majority of Commission’s findings”, there were errors in the EU’s assessment which undermine its right to fine Google.
Google AdSense acts like an advertising broker between advertisers and website owners. The search giant dominates the market the EU and the European Commission claimed the company used dirty tactics to prevent competition.
The European headquarters of Google AdSense is based in Dublin.
Responding to the judgment, a Google spokesperson said it was a case which only applied to a “very narrow subset of text-only search ads placed on a limited number of publishers’ websites” and that the company had already addressed concerns back in 2016.
The European Commission now has two months to decide whether to appeal the court decision.