Google on Wednesday won a court case against the European Union, which imposed a fine of 1.49 billion euros for abusing its dominant position over online advertising, in the latest in a series of legal battles between the tech giant and the EU.
EU courts overturned the penalty after ruling that there had been “errors” in the initial assessment.
On Wednesday, the European Court of Justice overturned a fine of 1.49 billion euros imposed by Brussels on Google for abusing its dominance over online advertising.
“The General Court annuls the decision of the European Commission in its entirety,” it is stated in the statement of the court based in Luxembourg, adding that “the institution made mistakes in its assessment”.
Brussels “did not take into account all the relevant circumstances in its assessment of the duration of the contractual clauses that the Commission considered abusive,” the court said, reports Frans 24.
The ruling will come as a relief for Google after the EU’s top court last week upheld a 2017 fine of 2.42 billion euros for abusing its dominance by favoring its own price comparison service.
As part of a major effort to tackle major abuses of technology, the EU fined Google a total of €8.2 billion between 2017 and 2019 for antitrust violations.
The €1.49 billion fine is the third of those fines, focused on Google’s Ad Sense service.
