An EU court has annulled a decision by the European Commission to impose a fine of almost €1.5 billion on Google.

The fine, imposed in 2019, had centred on contracts linked to an online advertising intermediation service called AdSense for Search (AFS).

AFS allowed the publishers of websites containing integrated search engines to display ads linked to the online queries that users could submit on those websites. In that way, publishers could receive a part of the revenues generated by the display of those ads.

After several complaints, the commission found that service agreements negotiated with some publishers contained clauses that could prevent other services from competing with AFS. Google removed or amended the clauses in 2016.

Duration of clauses

In its judgment today (18 September), the EU’s General Court, after having upheld the majority of the commission’s findings, nevertheless concluded that the EU body 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 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 [Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union],” the court stated.

In particular, the court found that the commission had not demonstrated that the clauses in question had been capable of deterring publishers from sourcing from Google’s competing intermediaries.