Google has lost its final appeal at Europe's top court in an antitrust case alleging that it abused the market dominance of its Android operating system (OS). With the court siding with European Union regulators, Google will now bear a 4.13 billion euro antitrust fine.
According to the Financial Times (FT) on Tuesday, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) rejected the appeal filed by Google and its parent company Alphabet. As a result, the 2022 ruling by the EU General Court, which upheld most of the antitrust sanctions imposed by the European Commission in 2018, was finalized.
Earlier, the European Commission judged that Google's requirement for smartphone manufacturers to pre-install Google Search and the Chrome browser as a condition for installing the Play Store had illegally strengthened its dominance in the search market. It also found that Google restricted competition by effectively blocking the use of alternative operating systems to Android.
In its ruling, the ECJ stated that "the pre-installation conditions included in the Android-related contracts produced anticompetitive effects."
With this ruling, Google will now bear a fine of 4.13 billion euros. This is the amount that the EU General Court partially reduced in 2022 from the 4.34 billion euro fine imposed by the European Commission in 2018.
Google pushed back. The company argued that "the ruling failed to properly recognize the enormous investment it has made to keep Android open, interoperable and free."
The Android case is one of the major antitrust cases the EU has brought against Google. The FT assessed that "the ruling will serve as an occasion to bolster the enforcement of the European Commission, which has been tightening regulation of the world's largest Big Tech companies."
