(Bloomberg) — Alphabet Inc.’s Google lost its court fight to topple a 150 million-euro ($163 million) French fine for mistreating companies using its online advertising platform.
The Paris court of appeals backed a 2019 decision by antitrust regulators who said Google abused its dominant position in search to set unfair rules for its Google Ads platform.
The judges said in their Thursday ruling that the tech company’s rules “have been defined and applied in a non-objective, non-transparent and discriminatory manner.”
While Google’s antitrust run-ins in Europe have cost the tech giant billion of euros, the 2019 decision by the Autorité de la concurrence was its first such fine in France. The company has tried different approaches in the country — it settled another French probe last year digging deeper into its online ad power and weeks after was criticized and fined half a billion euros in a disputed probe over the price of news.
Thursday’s ruling however did offer Google a minor victory, the appellate judges ruled that its French unit didn’t take part in the anticompetitive behavior.
Google said in a statement that it had already made some changes to the rules on its platform after the 2019 fine and is considering further amendments.
The tech giant was also critical of the initial plaintiff in the case, Gibmedia, a company operating weather information. The online search giant said it had suspended its account because it was running ads for websites that deceived people into paying for services available for free, or at a lower cost.
Hervé Lehman, a lawyer for Gibmedia, disputed Google’s claim that it had acted to protect consumers from harm and said his client didn’t carry out any misleading practices.
(Updates with details on the ruling starting in third paragraph)
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