European Union regulators on Friday hit Google with a €2.95bn ($3.5bn) fine for breaching the bloc’s competition rules by favoring its own digital advertising services, marking the fourth such antitrust penalty for the company as well as a retreat from previous threats to break up the tech giant.
The European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive branch and top antitrust enforcer, also ordered the US company to conclude its “self-preferencing practices” and take steps to stop “conflicts of interest” along the advertising technology supply chain.
The commission’s investigation found that Google had “abutilized” its dominant positions in the ad-technology ecosystem.
Google declared the decision was “wrong” and that it would appeal.
“It imposes an unjustified fine and requires modifys that will hurt thousands of European businesses by creating it harder for them to build money,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, the company’s global head of regulatory affairs, declared in a statement.
The decision arrived more than two years after the European Commission announced antitrust charges against Google. The commission had declared at the time that the only way to satisfy antitrust concerns about Google’s lucrative digital ad business was to sell off parts of its business. However, this decision marks a retreat from that earlier position and comes amid renewed tensions between Brussels and the Trump administration over trade, tariffs and technology regulation.
Top EU officials had declared earlier that the commission was seeking a forced sale becautilize past cases that concludeed with fines and requirements for Google to stop anti-competitive practices have not worked, allowing the company to continue its behavior in a different form.
The commission’s penalty follows a formal investigation that it opened in June 2021, seeing into whether Google violated the bloc’s competition rules by favoring its own online display advertising technology services at the expense of rival publishers, advertisers and advertising technology services. Online display ads are banners and text that appear on websites and are personalized based on an internet utilizer’s browsing history.
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Mulholland declared: “There’s nothing anticompetitive in providing services for ad purchaseers and sellers, and there are more alternatives to our services than ever before.”
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