Google’s eight-year fight against the European Union’s largest-ever antitrust fine is over. The European Court of Justice, the EU’s top court, dismissed Google and Alphabet‘s (Nasdaq: GOOGL) final appeal on July 2, upholding the 4.1 billion-euro ($4.67 billion) fine for its Android practices. Google has no further recourse.
Google’s contracts with phone makers required them to load Google Search and Chrome by default to license the Play Store, and in many cases barred rival, forked versions of Android. Brussels’ original 2018 decision, worth 4.34 billion euros, found that this gave Google an unfair edge over competing browsers, search tools, and app marketplaces just as smartphones became the primary way people got online.
A 2022 ruling trimmed the fine but left the underlying finding intact. Google pushed on to the bloc’s highest court, which sided with regulators.
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“The appeal brought by Google and Alphabet is dismissed,” the court said, confirming the penalty in full for what it found was Google’s abuse of a dominant position through its Android agreements.
A Google spokesperson said the ruling ignored the company’s investment in keeping Android open and interoperable, noting that Google adjusted its contracts to comply with the original 2018 decision.
The Android case is the third landmark EU antitrust action against Google, following a 2017 shopping-comparison penalty and a 2019 AdSense fine. Combined, Google now owes close to 11 billion euros in EU antitrust fines.
Separately, a Swedish court this week ordered Google to pay roughly $1.5 billion in damages to PriceRunner, which is now owned by Klarna.
Agustín Reyna, director general of the European Consumer Organization, said dominant companies “cannot use their power to shut out competition.”
The fine itself is minor for Alphabet, representing less than 3% of annual profit. The bigger question is whether phone makers gain more freedom to set defaults on Android going forward. Brussels is already policing Big Tech through a faster tool, the Digital Markets Act, under which Apple and Meta face scrutiny alongside Google.
Related: EU Antitrust Watchdog Opens Broad AI Stack Probes — Cloud, Data, and Chatbot Markets All in Scope
