The European Fee has fined Google €2.95 billion ($3.5 billion) for abusing its dominance within the digital promoting know-how market and favoring its adtech companies over these of its opponents.
Google was additionally ordered by the EU’s high antitrust regulator to cease anti-competitive and “self-preferencing” practices and take measures to mitigate future conflicts of curiosity within the adtech market.
Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s World Head of Regulatory Affairs, instructed BleepingComputer that the antitrust regulator’s determination was mistaken and that the corporate will attraction it.
“The European Fee’s determination about our advert tech companies is mistaken and we’ll attraction. It imposes an unjustified superb and requires adjustments that may damage 1000’s of European companies by making it more durable for them to earn cash,” Mulholland mentioned.
“There’s nothing anticompetitive in offering companies for advert patrons and sellers, and there are extra alternate options to our companies than ever earlier than.”
This follows the Fee’s notification to Google in June 2023 of a preliminary discovering that its abusive practices in internet marketing know-how violated the European Union’s antitrust guidelines regarding adtech operations. On the time, Google said that the Fee’s case “rests on flawed interpretations of the advert tech sector.”
That is the fourth time the European Fee has fined Google for abusing its market dominance. In March 2019, the Fee fined Google €1.49 billion ($1.7 billion) for blocking rival promoting corporations from displaying search adverts on writer search outcomes pages.
In July 2018, Google was fined €2.42 billion ($2.72 billion) for stopping different corporations from competing within the on-line search and comparability purchasing market by abusing its search engine dominance.
One 12 months earlier, in June 2017, the EU’s competitors watchdog imposed a report €4.34 billion ($5.04 billion) superb on Google “for unlawful practices relating to Android cell units to strengthen the dominance of Google’s search engine.”
On Wednesday, the Nationwide Fee on Informatics and Liberty (CNIL), France’s knowledge safety authority, additionally fined Google €325 million ($378 million) for displaying adverts between Gmail customers’ emails with out their consent and violating cookie rules.
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