European Union regulators on Friday hit Google with a €2.95bn ($3.5bn) fine for breaching the bloc’s competition rules by favoring its own digital advertising services, marking the fourth such antitrust penalty for the company as well as a retreat from previous threats to break up the tech giant.
The European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive branch and top antitrust enforcer, also ordered the US company to end its “self-preferencing practices” and take steps to stop “conflicts of interest” along the advertising technology supply chain.
The commission’s investigation found that Google had “abused” its dominant positions in the ad-technology ecosystem.
Google said the decision was “wrong” and that it would appeal.
“It imposes an unjustified fine and requires changes that will hurt thousands of European businesses by making it harder for them to make money,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, the company’s global head of regulatory affairs, said in a statement.
The decision arrived more than two years after the European Commission announced antitrust charges against Google. The commission had said at the time that the only way to satisfy antitrust concerns about Google’s lucrative digital ad business was to sell off parts of its business. However, this decision marks a retreat from that earlier position and comes amid renewed tensions between Brussels and the Trump administration over trade, tariffs and technology regulation.
Top EU officials had said earlier that the commission was seeking a forced sale because past cases that ended with fines and requirements for Google to stop anti-competitive practices have not worked, allowing the company to continue its behavior in a different form.
The commission’s penalty follows a formal investigation that it opened in June 2021, looking into whether Google violated the bloc’s competition rules by favoring its own online display advertising technology services at the expense of rival publishers, advertisers and advertising technology services. Online display ads are banners and text that appear on websites and are personalized based on an internet user’s browsing history.
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Mulholland said: “There’s nothing anticompetitive in providing services for ad buyers and sellers, and there are more alternatives to our services than ever before.”
