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Google has been fined €2.95 billion (roughly A$5.26 billion) by the European Union for anti-competitive advertising practices.
The European Commission said that, from at least 2014, Google had violated Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) by prioritising its own dominant adtech services, AdX, over those of competitors.
The commission said Google achieved this by alerting AdX about the best bids of its competitors, allowing it to secure ad auctions by submitting bids and avoiding competing exchanges, which boosts the appeal of AdX.
The European Commission also ordered Google to halt “self-preferencing” practices and take steps towards promoting competition in the adtech space.
Speaking with BleepingComputer, Google’s global head of regulatory affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland, said Google intends to appeal the decision and that its practices are not anti-competition.
“The European Commission’s decision about our adtech services is wrong, and we will appeal. It imposes an unjustified fine and requires changes that will hurt thousands of European businesses by making it harder for them to make money,” Mulholland said.
“There’s nothing anti-competitive in providing services for ad buyers and sellers, and there are more alternatives to our services than ever before.”
The commission had previously warned Google that its advertising practices violated EU antitrust rules after a 2023 preliminary finding, to which Google said the finding rested “on flawed interpretations of the ad sector”.
Google has been fined three previous times by the EU for anti-competitive advertising practices.
In June 2017, Google was slapped with a €4.34 billion (roughly A$6.77 billion at the time, now A$7.74 billion) fine for “illegal practices regarding Android mobile devices to strengthen the dominance of Google’s search engine”.
A year later, in 2018, the EU claimed that Google had abused its search engine dominance to prevent other companies from competing in online search and comparison shopping searches. Google was fined €2.42 billion (roughly A$3.83 billion at the time, A$4.32 billion now).
Then, in 2019, the commission once again fined Google for blocking ads displayed by competitor advertising companies on publisher search result pages.
Just last week, the US ordered Google to share its search data with its AI rivals.
While Google’s parent company, Alphabet, dodged having to sell its Chrome browser, US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that after a court battle that lasted years, the company would have to share its search data with other companies.
The case, which began in 2020, was in regard to Google’s dominance as a search engine, being the default search engine on a range of products, including its own Android and Chrome devices.
While the US Department of Justice had demanded that Chrome be sold by Google, the decision instead allows Google to keep Chrome, but rules that search data must be shared and revenue-sharing agreements to make Google the default browser, such as the one it has with Apple, be limited.
Google said the ruling is a win for the company and that the development of generative AI likely influenced the ruling.
“Today’s decision recognises how much the industry has changed through the advent of AI, which is giving people so many more ways to find information,” Google said in a statement on Tuesday (2 September).
“This underlines what we’ve been saying since this case was filed in 2020: Competition is intense and people can easily choose the services they want.”
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