European Commission to impose a record fine on Google within a few weeks
The European Commission would decide within weeks to impose a record fine on Google for abusing its dominant position in the search engine market and taking advantage of Google’s comparison shopping service. Sources told the Financial Times.
The amount of the fine will be a maximum of ten percent of the annual turnover of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Alphabet achieved 90 billion dollars in turnover last year, so the fine can be up to 9 billion dollars or about 8 billion euros. The fine is calculated by multiplying a maximum of thirty percent of the revenue generated by Google with the store part in the search results by the number of years that the abuse has occurred.
It could become a record fine in an abuse of power case; the highest fine imposed so far by the EU for this antitrust violation is €1 billion. Intel was fined in 2009 for abusing its monopoly position.
The record fine would be imposed within weeks after the Commission believes Google abused its dominant position in the search engine market by giving its other services, such as price comparison sites, an unfair advantage by placing them prominently in search results. In July 2016, the European Commission brought a case against Google for this abuse.
In addition to the investigation into Google’s dominant position in the search engine market and the advantage that Google’s price comparison gets from this, there are two other Commission investigations into Google’s practices. The European Commission filed a complaint against Google in the Android case a year ago. The complaint stated that the internet company was abusing its market position by requiring smartphone and tablet makers to pre-install Google apps, such as Search and the Chrome browser, on their Android devices. According to Google, the delivery of apps is necessary to continue investing in its operating system.
The third case has to do with Google’s AdSense. The core of this case is that, according to the Commission, Google has infringed competition rules through its AdSense platform over the past ten years by imposing certain conditions in agreements with a limited number of large third parties. This specifically concerns search ads that are displayed after users have searched for something on websites that use a custom search engine from Google.