Newsman: The European Union’s top court backed a €2.4 billion EU antitrust fine for Google.
The Court of Justice said Google’s practice of favoring its own shopping search results over rival services “was discriminatory.” The ruling can’t be appealed.
Judges said that EU law forbids behavior that prevents “the maintenance or growth of competition in a market in which the degree of competition is already weakened, precisely because of the presence of one or more undertakings in a dominant position.”
Meanwhile, In the United States, Google facing another antitrust lawsuit over its advertising technology, a month after a judge declared Google’s search engine an illegal monopoly.
The Justice Department, joined by a coalition of states, and Google each made opening statements Monday to a federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, who will decide whether Google holds a monopoly over online advertising technology.
The regulators contend that Google built, acquired and maintains a monopoly over the technology that matches online publishers to advertisers. Dominance over the software on both the buy side and the sell side of the transaction enables Google to keep as much as 36 cents on the dollar when it brokers sales between publishers and advertisers, the government contends.
They allege that Google also controls the ad exchange market, which matches the buy side to the sell side.
“One monopoly is bad enough. But a trifecta of monopolies is what we have here,” Justice Department lawyer Julia Tarver Wood said during her opening statement.
Google says the government’s case is based on an internet of yesteryear, when desktop computers ruled and internet users carefully typed precise World Wide Web addresses into URL fields. Advertisers now are more likely to turn to social media companies like TikTok or streaming TV services like Peacock.
In her opening statement, Google lawyer Karen Dunn likened the government’s case to a “time capsule with a Blackberry, an iPod and a Blockbuster video card.”
In the search engine case, the judge has not yet imposed any remedies. The government hasn’t offered its proposed sanctions, though there could be close scrutiny over whether Google should be allowed to continue to make exclusivity deals that ensure its search engine is consumers’ default option.
EU antitrust investigations fined Google in 2017 for favored its own shopping search results over rival services. The European Commission is weighing a break-up of the company’s businesses. Google is still fighting two other EU penalties, including a record €4.3 billion antitrust fine for its Google Android operating system.
According to Google’s annual reports, revenue has actually declined in recent years for Google Networks, the division of the Mountain View that includes such services as AdSense and Google Ad Manager that are at the heart of the case, from $31.7 billion in 2021 to $31.3 billion in 2023.
