Google appeals record EU fine over Android
brussels — Google on Tuesday appealed the biggest ever antitrust fine by the EU, which imposed a €4.34 billion ($5 billion) penalty on the US tech giant for illegally abusing the dominance of its operating system for mobile devices.
In an email to AFP, Google spokesman Al Verney confirmed that “we have now filed our appeal of the European Commission’s Android decision at the General Court of the European Union.”
In its July decision, Brussels accused Google of using the Android system’s huge popularity on smartphones and tablets to promote the use of its own Google search engine and shut out rivals.
EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager ordered Google to “put an effective end to this conduct within 90 days or face penalty payments” of up to five per cent of its average daily turnover. The sanction nearly doubled the previous record EU antitrust fine of €2.4 billion, which also targeted Google, in that case for the Silicon Valley titan’s shopping comparison service in 2017.
Google provides Android free to smartphone manufacturers and generates most of its revenue from selling advertisements that appear along with search results.
But Vestager said Google had shut out rivals by forcing major phone makers including South Korea’s Samsung and China’s Huawei to pre-install its search engine and Google Chrome browser.