It was three years ago that EU antitrust regulators fined Google 1.49 billion euros (about $1.6 billion) for stifling competition in online search advertising. On Monday, Google asked Europe’s second-highest court to throw out the fine, saying that the fine was unfair.
In total, the EU has fined the world’s most popular internet search engine 8.25 billion euros for antitrust violations. This case is one of three.
It said that Google used its power to stop websites from using brokers other than its own AdSense platform that sold search ads. People did illegal things from 2006 to 2016, the Commission says.
Google then went to the General Court in the city of Luxembourg to fight the EU’s decision. The three-day hearing will start on Monday. The company will lay out its case.
It was wrong for the EU competition watchdog to say that Google had too much power, and for the Commission to say that search ads and non-search ads didn’t compete, Google said in a court document.
Even the Commission disagreed. It said that Google’s exclusivity and premium placement clauses were not fair and that the minimum number of Google ads was not fair.
In court last year, Google lost a fight against an antitrust decision that said it couldn’t use its own price comparison shopping service to give itself an unfair advantage over smaller European competitors who didn’t have as much money as Google did to run it.