Google wins appeal against €1.5 billion EU competition fine

Google has won an appeal against a €1.5 billion competition fine from the European Commission in a victory for the Big Tech group as it comes under growing scrutiny from Brussels regulators. The European Union’s General Court said that while it accepted “most of the commission’s assessments” that the company had used its dominant position to block rival online advertisers, it annulled the hefty fine levied against Google in the case. When launching the action against Google in 2019, Margrethe Vestager, the bloc’s competition chief, said that the search giant had imposed anti-competitive restrictions on third-party websites for a decade between 2006 and 2016. However, the Luxembourg-based General Court found that the commission, the EU’s executive arm, had failed “to take into account all the relevant circumstances in its assessment of the duration of the contractual clauses that it had found to be unfair”.