Google fined £1.3billion over adverts
EU issues third penalty after firm abused monopoly to hinder rivals
GOOGLE has been fined £ 1.3billion for abusing its monopoly on online advertising for more than a decade.
The European Commissioner for Competition said the web giant’s ‘Adsense’ advertising service acted illegally by barring its clients from displaying any adverts from rival advertising services.
The ‘ misconduct’ stopped Google’s rivals from growing and deprived users from the ‘benefits of competition,’ the watchdog warned.
It is the third major sanction that the European Union Competition Commission has taken against the web giant in the last two years – with the combined fines standing at £7.1billion.
Last summer, it fined Google £3.7billion for abusing the dominant market position of its Android operating system to boost its own search engine.
And in 2017, it ordered the web giant to hand over £2.1billion for artificially boosting its own ‘ Google shopping’ price comparison service in search results.
Yesterday, EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said: ‘The misconduct lasted over ten years and denied other companies the possibility to compete on the merits and to innovate – and consumers the benefits of competition.’
She added that Brussels’ three fines against Google are still a long way short of the maximum fine possible – which is 10 per cent of turnover.
The sanctions are all part of a long- running war between Google and the European watchdog, which was originally sparked ten years ago by a comthe plaint from Microsoft, one of the web search giant’s chief rivals. Microsoft subsequently dropped its complaint, but Brussels has continued to pursue Google.
The internet search website
‘Misconduct went on for ten years’
has already appealed to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg against the first two fines it received.
Yesterday, Google’s public affairs chief Kent Walker said company had ‘already made a wide range of changes to our products to address the Commission’s concerns’ and that more changes are planned. He added: ‘ Over the next few months, we’ll be making further updates to give more visibility to rivals in Europe.’
It promised to start asking all Android users in Europe which browser and search engines they would like to use, instead of simply pushing them to Google’s. It also revealed that it is working on a new format for results on Google Shopping, including links to other comparison websites. The fine from the European Union Competition Commission comes as Google faces mounting pressure in the UK over abuse of its dominant market position.
Earlier this month, the Government called on the Competition and Markets Authority to launch a probe into the ‘opaque’ online advertising business, primarily controlled by Google and Facebook.
The two web giants control more than half of the £11.6billion online advertising market in the UK, but experts fear that it is so complex they are killing off competitors and pushing costs up for consumers.