Google has won its fight against a £1.3 billion antitrust fine levied five years ago by the European Union over its advertising practices.
Triggered by a complaint from Microsoft in 2010, Google was accused by the European Commission of abusing its market dominance by restricting rivals from displaying search ads between 2006 and 2016.
The Luxembourg-based General Court, Europe’s second-highest, upheld much of the findings but annulled the fine “on the grounds in particular that it had failed to take into account all the relevant circumstances in its assessment of the duration of the contractual clauses that it had found to be unfair”.
Last week the EU’s top court upheld a €2.4bn (£2bn) fine against Google for using its price comparison shopping service to gain an unfair advantage over smaller European rivals.
And earlier this month, UK regulator the Competition and Markets Authority provisionally found that it uses anti-competitive practices to monopolise the market.
Google’s parent company Alphabet is also being taken to court by the US government over the same accusation.