The European Union has sustained Google’s 2018 antitrust complaint, finding that the corporation put “unlawful limitations” on Android phone makers in order to promote its search engine on mobile devices.
Google has been fighting the accusation since it was revealed in 2018. It included a record-breaking €4.3 billion punishment, which the EU’s General Court lowered to €4.1 billion this morning after declaring that the verdict was “mostly confirmed.” This confirmation is a significant blow to Google and reinforces the stance of the EU’s antitrust campaigners, headed by Margrethe Vestager, who have targeted Big Tech’s excesses.
The initial allegation filed against Google in 2018 claimed that the firm exploited its market dominance by compelling Android phone makers to limit how their products were marketed. Manufacturers were required to agree not to sell phones running unapproved versions of Android (“forks”), as well as to pre-install Google’s Search and Chrome applications alongside the company’s app store, the Play Store. As part of a revenue-sharing agreement, Google also paid phone makers and mobile carriers to only install Google search on handsets.
Google perceived the emergence of smartphones as an existential danger to its (then-desktop-based) search business, according to the Commission’s study. As a result, the internet titan coerced phone manufacturers into putting its search engine front and center on their handsets.
Google’s legal response focused on several arguments, including that the Commission incorrectly judged the company to be dominant in the mobile market (due to the existence of iOS) and that its actions were necessary to prevent the Android ecosystem from fragmenting into many incompatible operating systems. (To which the Commission responds: incompatible or not, encouraging rival mobile OSes is precisely what a competitive market seeks.)
The General Court’s decision today supported the overwhelming bulk of the Commission’s initial allegations. However, the Court determined that Google’s revenue-sharing agreements with manufacturers did not constitute an abuse of Google’s market dominance, and so decreased the punishment by around 5% to €4.1 billion.
The ruling issued today by the EU’s second-highest court, the General Court, means that Google may appeal it to the bloc’s top court, the Court of Justice. Google must now wait two months and ten days before filing another appeal.
