LUXEMBOURG: Google suffered a legal blow at the European Court of Justice on Thursday, when the body’s adviser recommended upholding a record fine imposed on the company for anti-competitive practices.
The US tech giant has been trying to overturn on appeal a 4.3-billion-euro ($4.9 billion) fine imposed by the European Commission in 2018, which was later reduced to 4.1 billion euros.
But in its opinion, Juliane Kokott, advocate general at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), said “the legal arguments put forward by Google are ineffective”, the court later said in a statement.
Although not binding, such advice carries weight and is often followed by EU judges in their rulings.
The commission, the EU’s antitrust regulator, had accused Google of abusing the popularity of its Android operating system to restrict competition.
It alleged Google pressured phone makers using Android to pre-install its search engine and Google Chrome browser -- essentially shutting out rivals.
The findings were upheld in 2022 by the European Union’s second-highest court, which slightly reduced the fine.
The levy remains the EU’s biggest ever.
Arguing that the commission’s case was unfounded and that the sanction penalised innovation, Google appealed to the EU’s top court.
The company had also pushed the case that the EU was unfairly blind to Apple, which gives preference to its own services, such as Safari on iPhones.
Thursday’s advice will guide the EUCJ in its decision. The court has the final say on the matter.
“Google held a dominant position in several markets of the Android-ecosystem and thus benefited from network effects that enabled it to ensure that users used Google Search,“ the court said, detailing Kokott’s opinion.
“As a result, Google obtained access to data that enabled it in turn to improve its service. No hypothetical as-efficient competitor could have found itself in such a situation,“ the statement read.
As part of a major push to target big tech abuses, the EU slapped Google with fines worth a total of 8.2 billion euros between 2017 and 2019 over antitrust violations.
This set off a series of long-running legal battles.
Brussels has since armed itself with a more powerful legal weapon known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA), to rein in tech giants.
Rather than regulators discovering egregious antitrust violations after probes lasting many years, the DMA gives businesses a list of what they can and cannot do online.
In March, the commission informed Google parent Alphabet that preliminary reviews concluded its search engine and Google Play app store operated in ways that run afoul of the new rules.
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