A global effort to undermine the power of the world’s largest tech company scored a significant legal victory on Wednesday, with a European Union court upholding the record billions of dollars imposed against Google in 2018. Granted a dollar fine.
The decision by the Luxembourg General Court gives new impetus to European regulators, which have been investigating companies such as Google, Amazon and Apple for anti-competitive business practices. The fine of €4.34 billion (valued at $5.1 billion in 2018) was the highest ever imposed by European competition authorities. A court on Wednesday agreed that Google had violated antitrust laws by using its Android smartphone technology and its dominance in the market to strengthen its search engine leadership.
A legal defeat would have tarnished the European Union’s reputation as one of the world’s most aggressive regulators of the tech industry, as Bloc promised to crack down on Big Tech even more. The Brussels antitrust regulator, led by the European Commission’s Executive Vice President in charge, Margrethe Vestager, has other investigations into Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta. And this year, EU policymakers passed new laws related to competition and Internet content moderation. This will allow regulators to further strengthen their powers over the technology industry.
Google said disappointed decisiondid not say whether it would appeal to the bloc’s highest court, the European Court of Justice. We support thousands of businesses.
The Android lawsuit is one of the world’s most aggressive regulatory actions ever taken against a technology company. A 2018 ruling found that Google was illegally using Android to secure its search engine dominance. The company signed a deal to require Android-dependent smartphone makers such as Samsung and Huawei to make Google their default search engine and to keep out smaller rivals such as DuckDuckGo and Bing, according to regulators. Google is now offering European users of Android devices a screen to choose from different search engines.
European regulators have dismissed previous appeals, including those against semiconductor companies Intel and Qualcomm, so a victory was not guaranteed. On Wednesday, the court almost entirely upheld the regulator, but imposed a fine of 4.125 billion euros (41 million euros at the current exchange rate) for calculations related to the revenue-sharing agreements Google has entered into with phone makers and networks. equivalent to $30 million). operator.