The European Fee has fined Google €2.95 billion ($3.5 billion) for abusing its dominance within the digital promoting expertise market and favoring its adtech companies over these of its opponents.
Google was additionally ordered by the EU’s prime 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 International Head of Regulatory Affairs, informed BleepingComputer that the antitrust regulator’s choice was fallacious and that the corporate will enchantment it.
“The European Fee’s choice about our advert tech companies is fallacious and we are going to enchantment. It imposes an unjustified tremendous and requires adjustments that can damage hundreds of European companies by making it tougher for them to become profitable,” Mulholland mentioned.
“There’s nothing anticompetitive in offering companies for advert patrons and sellers, and there are extra 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 expertise violated the European Union’s antitrust guidelines regarding adtech operations. On the time, Google acknowledged 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 firms from displaying search adverts on writer search outcomes pages.
In July 2018, Google was fined €2.42 billion ($2.72 billion) for stopping different firms from competing within the on-line search and comparability purchasing market by abusing its search engine dominance.
One yr earlier, in June 2017, the EU’s competitors watchdog imposed a document €4.34 billion ($5.04 billion) tremendous on Google “for unlawful practices relating to Android cellular gadgets 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 laws.
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