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Alphabet Inc.'s (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google won its appeal against the European Commission's €1.49 billion ($1.66 billion) antitrust fine for anticompetitive practices involving its online search advertising business.
What Happened: Luxembourg-based General Court delivered a reprieve to Google, nullifying the line about the $1.66 billion penalty in the European Commission's five-year-old order against the search giant, reported Reuters.
In its verdict delivered in 2019, the European Commission found Google abusing its dominant position to prevent advertisers from using brokers competing against AdSense.
While the European Commission's verdict noted that the abuse took place between 2006 and 2016, the General Court observed that the judgment did not take into account "all the relevant circumstances."
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“The court (…) upheld most of the commission’s assessments, but annulled the decision imposing a fine of almost 1.5 billion euros on Google, 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,” the judges said, according to the report.
It is worth noting that despite overturning the $1.66 billion fine, the court has not nullified the European Commission's observations regarding Google's antitrust practices.
Why It Matters: This fine was a part of the European Union's crackdown on Google's anticompetitive business practices, totaling over $10.6 billion.
Earlier in January, Google was fined $2.6 billion for unjustly favoring its own shopping services over those of its rivals.
Among the biggest fines, though, was for Google forcing Android device manufacturers to pre-install its apps – at $5.1 billion, it is nearly half of the EU's antitrust fines against the search giant.
Price Action: Google's Class A shares were up 0.6% in premarket trading on Wednesday, after closing at $159.32 on Tuesday, according to Benzinga Pro data.
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