Europe’s highest court affirmed its €4.1 billion antitrust fine on Google’s Android practices in a precedent-setting case that reinforces the EU’s ability to police big tech, as the company’s last bid for a reprieve failed.
Thursday the Court of Justice of the European Union rejected Google’s appeal after the initial decision that it had abused its dominant position in the Android mobile operating system market, against its parent company Alphabet.
It was a case that the European Commission brought to a conclusion in 2018, when it slapped Google with a whopping fine of €4.34 billion, finding that the company had consolidated the dominance of its search engine and other services through contractual deals with smartphone makers.
Google mandated that device makers have to pre-install Google Search, Chrome web browser and the Google Play Store on their smartphones using Android, the Commission said. In addition, regulators discovered that when certain manufacturers manufactured mobile devices, they were discouraged from implementing their own devices with a variant of Android software provided by a competitor, which restricted the competition with regard to mobile software.
Google has appealed the ruling, and in 2022 the EU’s General Court affirmed the Commission’s findings, though it lowered the penalty to €4.1 billion. The company then took its case to the Court of Justice, the EU’s top court.
In its judgment, the court rejected Google’s arguments and upheld that the company’s practices in relation to Android were an abuse of its market position.
The judges said: “The appeal filed by Google and its parent company Alphabet against the judgment of the General Court is dismissed, thus confirming the penalty for the abuse of a dominant position in the context of the Android operating system for Google Search.
Google, in a statement released after the ruling, said that it was disappointed as the judgment did not reflect its efforts to maintain the openness and free availability of Android to device makers.
Google had already updated its contracts in the wake of the European Commission’s initial ruling in 2018 and is “committed to innovation, openness and supporting users, partners and developers,” said a company spokesperson.
This is another big blow for Google in Europe, where it has been slapped with antitrust fines totaling nearly €11 billion in the last decade in various competition cases.
European regulators are also intensifying oversight of big tech companies under the Digital Markets Act, the decision comes at the same time. Google is also currently under other investigations alleging it is favoring its own products and services in search results and for some behaviours associated with its app marketplace.
Thursday’s ruling is likely to strengthen the European Union’s push to regulate the market power of the influential digital giants, and foster more competition in the tech industry.
