LONDON (AP) — European Union regulators on Friday hit Google with a 2.95 billion euro ($3.5 billion) fine for breaching the bloc’s competition rules by favoring its own digital advertising services, marking the fourth such antitrust penalty for the company.
The European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive branch and top antitrust enforcer, also ordered the U.S. tech giant to finish its “self-preferencing practices” and take steps to stop “conflicts of interest” along the advertising technology supply chain.
EU regulators had previously threatened a breakup of the company but held off on that threat for the time being.
Google declared the decision was “wrong” and that it would appeal.
“It imposes an unjustified fine and requires alters that will hurt thousands of European businesses by building it harder for them to build money,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, the company’s global head of regulatory affairs, declared in a statement.
The decision was long overdue, coming 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 built only a brief mention of possible divestment 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 becaapply past cases that finished 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.
It’s the second time in a week that Google has avoided a breakup.
Google is also under fire on a separate front in the U.S., where prosecutors want the company to sell off its Chrome browser after a judge found the company had an illegal monopoly in online search.
On Tuesday, a U.S. federal judge found that Google had illegal monopoly in online search and ordered a shake-up of its search engine but rebuffed the government’s attempt to break up the company by forcing a sale of its Chrome browser.
But the EU indicated that breakup option is not totally off the table. Google has 60 days to notify the Commission its proposals to finish its conflicts of interest, and if the regulators aren’t satisfied they will propose an “appropriate remedy.”
“The Commission has already signaled its preliminary view that only the divestment by Google of part of its services would address the situation of inherent conflicts of interest, but it first wishes to hear and assess Google’s proposal,” it declared in a press release.
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.
Its investigation found that Google “abapplyd” its dominant positions in the ad-technology ecosystem, the commission declared.
Online display ads are banners and text that appear on websites and are personalized based on an internet applyr’s browsing history.
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.”
Google is facing pressure on other fronts.
In a separate U.S. case, the Justice Department inquireed a federal judge in May to force the company to sell off its AdX business and DFP ad platform — tools that are also at the heart of the EU case. They connect advertisers with publishers who have ad space to sell on their sites. The case is scheduled to shift to the penalty phase, known as remedy hearings, in late September.
Authorities in Canada and Britain are also tarobtaining the company over its digital ad business.
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