As has just been shown in court, Google is not going to have it easy against the EU. European justice has just dismissed the first of the appeals that the American technology company had raised to avoid having to pay a fee. fine of 2,420 million euros for abuse of dominant position.
The fine dates back to 2017, when the European Commission, through the Competition Commission headed by Margrethe Vestager, decided to fine Google for monopolistic practices in Google Shopping, an e-commerce price comparison service that, according to the Commission itself, harmed small European online businesses.
This fine, however, would be just an appetizer of those that would come later and that would end up adding penalties of more than 8,200 million euros in the last five years. In this sense, in 2018 the EC again fined the company 4,343 million euros for monopolistic practices on Android, and in 2019, another 1,490 million euros for abusive advertising practices in AdSense. At this moment in fact, the EC is studying to fine the multinational again for possible anticompetitive conduct in the Internet advertising technology market.
According to the sources consulted by Reuters, it is very likely that the European justice will use similar arguments to dismiss the two appeals that it will have to examine in the coming months, especially if we take into account that in these two cases the position of the EC is even more solid than where you just failed.
That the court has dismissed this first appeal is good news for Vestager, which is thus reinforced when it comes to intensifying some of the investigation processes that are still ongoing and that affect Amazon, Apple and Facebook.
For its part, Google has limited itself to communicating that it will review the sentence in detail, also arguing that it has already complied with the order of the European Commission to guarantee free competition in Google Shopping. However, it has not clarified whether it will take the case before the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU), the highest instance of the Union in matters of justice and before which it is still necessary to present a last resort.
For its part, from the EC they have congratulated themselves on this ruling and have assured that “it will continue to use all the tools at its disposal to address the role of the large digital platforms on which companies and users depend to, respectively, access end users and access digital services.
