THE EUROPEAN UNION’S second-highest court on Wednesday overwhelmingly upheld the EU’s record fine against Google over its Android operating system for mobile phones, reducing it only slightly for technical reasons.
In a statement, the EU’s General court said it “largely confirms the commission’s decision that Google imposed unlawful restrictions on manufacturers of Android mobile devices” in order to benefit its search engine.
The court, however, said the fine should be slightly reduced to €4.125 billion ($4.1 billion), instead of the €4.3 billion decided by the commission in 2018.
Google urged a panel of EU judges last year to throw out the decision it argued was unfounded and falsely relied on accusations it imposed its search engine and Chrome browser on Android phones.
The company also said that the EU was unfairly blind to the strength of Apple, which imposes or gives clear preference to its own services such as Safari on iPhones.
Google insisted that downloading rival apps was only a click away and that customers were in no way tied to Google products on Android.
The EU and complainants responded that Google used contracts with phone makers in the early days of Android to stifle rivals.
This was done “at a critical time in the development of mobile computing, when the market was still contestable”, said Thomas Vinje, a lawyer representing FairSearch, whose original complaint launched the case in 2013.
In a statement issued today, Google said it was disappointed at an EU court’s decision to mostly uphold the record fine.
“We are disappointed that the court did not annul the decision in full. Android has created more choice for everyone, not less, and supports thousands of successful businesses in Europe and around the world,” the company said in a short statement.
The Android case was the third of three major cases brought against Google by the EU’s competition czar Margrethe Vestager, whose legal challenges were the first worldwide to directly take on the Silicon Valley giants.
Since then, global regulators have followed suit, with Google facing a barrage of cases in the US and Asia based on similar accusations.
Vestager has already won against Google in its appeal of a separate case, the company’s 2.4-billion-euro fine for abusing its search engine dominance. As expected, the tech giant appealed that setback to the high court.
The EU, however, has lost recent cases involving the microchip industry.
Vestager’s team lost an appeal against a $1 billion fine imposed on Qualcomm in the same court in June.
That followed another setback in January when the EU lost the court’s backing for a 1.06-billion-euro fine on Intel.
Frustrated at the length of time it takes to pursue competition cases, Brussels has since then adopted the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which puts a much tighter leash on the way Big Tech can do business.
The new law, set to come into force next year, would set up a rulebook of do’s and don’ts for Big Tech companies such as Google and Facebook.
The DMA includes specific bans or limits on Google, Apple and other gatekeepers from promoting their own services on platforms.
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