The General Court of the European Union, the second highest court of the Old Continent is studying since Monday May 2 and until Wednesday Google’s appeal against an antitrust fine from the Commission of 2019. The sanction, of 1.49 billion euros ‘euros, relates to the practices of Google’s advertising agency, AdSense.
Google’s defense doesn’t mince words
Bloomberg reports that in court, Google’s defense found the fine imposed on the company to be ” large-scale quasi-criminal “. Lawyers for the American giant denounced ” characterization errors and criticized the European Commission for having proceeded on an erroneous basis in its evaluation of the clauses and which led to material errors of analysis “.
Are Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey on the same wavelength for the future of Twitter?
The case concerns Google’s online advertising activity and more specifically its AdSense for Search management. The Commission accuses the giant of having knowingly, for 10 years, implemented exclusivity agreements to prevent their customers from using competing services.
Commission counsel regretted that Google had ” did not want to rely on the intrinsic merits of his service, but preferred to resort to the disputed clauses “. He believes that the exclusivity clauses were ” clearly capable of restricting competition, as Google well knew “.
This procedure is part of a trio of lawsuits carried out by the European competition authorities under the direction of Margrethe Vestager, then European Commissioner.
A heavy liability
In June 2017 Mountain View was fined 2.42 billion euros for abuse of a dominant position for online research, in July 2018 again, this time the fine is 4.34 billion euros for having favored its search engine on Android, then in 2019 the AdSense affair.
The judges of the General Court of the European Union now know very well the lawyers of Google, the company has systematically appealed. The action for annulment relating to the Android case will be studied on September 14, 2022.