Google is again fined by the European Union. This time it would be unfair competition with advertising platform AdSense. Sources close to Margrethe Vestager, European Commissioner for Competition, say that this week the fine will be confirmed.
In total, three sources report to the Financial Times that Margrethe Vestager will be setting a fine for Google this week. This is not the first time that Google has had to deposit a sum of money with the EU. At the beginning of this year, it received a GDPR fine of 50 million euros imposed by the French government agency Commission nationale de linformatique et des libertés (CNIL).
Only last year, Google received a monster fine of 4.3 billion euros from the European Commission. It was about the monopoly position of Android and the associated apps that are standard for Google. The monster fine exceeds the 2017 fine record, which was also for Google. Then it was 2.4 billion euros because Google gave its own online shopping services priority over other online stores in the search results.
Alphabet
For the time being, it is not clear what the fine will be this time. In theory, the fine could amount to 13 billion euros, 10% of the annual turnover of parent company Alphabet. According to anonymous sources, the fine would not be close to the theoretical maximum.
The European Commission’s Google AdSense lawsuit starts as early as 2016. The investigation has shown that a number of large parties using the platform would be subject to restrictive conditions. For example, they shouldn’t be allowed to use search ads from Google competitors and they get a fixed minimum number of search ads that they have to display on their websites. Expect more clarity on this matter this week.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.