Google suffered a setback on Thursday as an adviser to Europe’s top court said a €1.49 billion ($1.7 billion) antitrust fine against the company should be revived. Advocate General Juliane Kokott told the Court of Justice of the European Union that the lower court was wrong to scrap the penalty in 2024, and that the case should be looked at afresh.

The opinion, delivered in Luxembourg on 12 November, is not binding, but the Court of Justice follows the recommendations of its advocates general in most cases. A final ruling is expected in the coming months, and it will decide whether one of the European Commission’s biggest fines against Google stands or falls for good.

What the adviser said

Kokott said the General Court had wrongly concluded that the European Commission had not proved the harmful effects of Google’s contracts, and had failed to look at all the evidence in its context. In her view, the lower court overlooked the importance of an overall assessment of whether Google’s advertising contracts were capable of restricting competition. The 2024 annulment should therefore be set aside and the case sent back for a fresh review.

The opinion backs the Commission’s appeal against the General Court’s judgment of 18 September 2024, which had annulled the fine. The case before the Court of Justice is registered as C-826/24 P, Commission v Google and Alphabet.

The original fine

The Commission fined Google €1.49 billion in March 2019 over its AdSense advertising service. Regulators found that, between 2006 and 2016, Google used restrictive clauses in contracts with publishers that stopped rival search advertisers from placing advertisements on those publishers’ websites, reinforcing Google’s dominance in online search advertising intermediation.

Google challenged the decision, and the General Court sided with the company in 2024, finding that the Commission had failed to properly assess the duration and the market effects of the contractual restrictions. The Commission appealed, and Google in turn urged the top court at a hearing in July to dismiss that appeal, arguing that the regulators’ case was flawed.

The AdSense penalty was one of four EU antitrust fines imposed on Google that together total €9.5 billion, in a dispute with Brussels stretching back almost two decades. The other cases concerned Google’s shopping service, its Android mobile operating system and its AdWords advertising programme.

What happens next

The Court of Justice will now consider Kokott’s opinion before handing down its judgment. If the judges agree with her, the annulment will be overturned and the case will return to the General Court for reconsideration, keeping the €1.49 billion fine in play. If they disagree, the 2024 ruling stands and the fine stays cancelled.

Either way, the decision will shape how far EU competition regulators can go in policing the contracts of dominant technology companies, and it will be watched closely by publishers and rival advertisers across Europe.

Sources: Reuters; MLex.