The entrance to Google’s office at Pancras Square in London. Credit: Jonny Gios on Unsplash Google’s one judicial win against Brussels may not survive, as an adviser to the EU’s top court said on Thursday that the General Court erred in 2024 when it annulled the company’s €1.49B ($1.7B) AdSense fine, and proposed that the judgment be set aside and the case sent back for a fresh ruling. The fine, imposed in March 2019, was one of six EU antitrust penalties that have cost Google €10.38B over nearly two decades. It was also the only one a court ever threw out, a decision the European Commission appealed to the Court of Justice.
The case concerns AdSense for Search, which lets websites with built-in search boxes run Google search ads for a revenue share. From March 2009, Google’s template contracts with publishers carried clauses that restricted or barred ads from rival services: an exclusivity clause, a placement clause reserving the most visible space for Google’s ads, and a prior-authorisation clause for changes. The Commission found the practices ran from 2006 to 2016, when Google dropped or amended the clauses after Brussels opened proceedings. The General Court accepted much of that but annulled the decision anyway, finding the Commission had not sufficiently assessed the duration of the publisher contracts.
That, Advocate General Juliane Kokott argued on Thursday, got the law wrong: the lower court had already accepted the clauses were capable of producing the exclusionary effects the Commission found, and “thereby imposed excessive requirements as to the scope of the examination of the criterion of duration”. A cumulative assessment of the contracts, which the Commission carried out, was enough; no clause-by-clause, contract-by-contract dissection was required. An Advocate General’s opinion does not bind the court, and even if the judges follow it, the fine does not simply snap back: the case would return to the General Court for a new judgment. The ruling is expected next year.
Google has reason to take the opinion seriously. Kokott also wrote the advisory opinions in the Shopping and Android cases, and the court followed her both times: the €2.4B Shopping fine was confirmed in 2024, and the Android fine of €4.1B was upheld in July and has since been paid into the EU budget. The ledger keeps growing regardless. Google is separately contesting a near-€3B adtech fine, and its first Digital Markets Act penalty has rivals lining up damages claims across Europe.
The AdSense annulment was the one card in Google’s hand that said Brussels could lose, and Juliane Kokott has just proposed taking it back. Get the TNW newsletter ✕ Close Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.
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