Google on Monday (May 2) asked Luxembourg-based General Court to do away with a $1.6 billion fine handed down three years ago by antitrust regulators who said the search engine hampered its rivals in online search advertising, according to a Reuters report.
European Union antitrust regulators have fined Google almost $8.7 billion in three related cases in the last three years, the report says.
In its 2019 decision, the European Commission said the company “had abused its dominance to stop websites using brokers other than its AdSense platform,” with the illegal activities spanning from 2006 to 2016, according to the report.
Google challenged the EU finding and will present its appeal of the $1.6 billion fine in a three-day hearing that starts Monday. Google says the EU competition enforcer and the Commission were wrong when they said the search engine platform rubbed out the competition through their dominance and that their search ads and non-search ads don’t compete.
The company also questioned why the Commission ruled that the company’s exclusivity, premium placement and minimum Google ads clauses were abusive, the report says.
Last year, Google lost a $2.76 billion antitrust decision over the use of its own price comparison shopping service to gain an unfair advantage over smaller European rivals, according to the report.
In early April, Judge Amit Mehta, the U.S. federal judge hearing the government’s antitrust case against Alphabet’s Google, questioned whether he can sanction the company for overzealous attorney-client privilege use, saying it hinges on whether the behavior occurred before the Justice Department’s lawsuit was filed.
Reuters wrote that the Justice Department asked the judge if it could sanction Google over the company’s “Communicate with Care” program, which asked employees to add a lawyer to many emails and was sometimes a “game” to shield communications that didn’t actually constitute attorney-client privilege. Google has maintained that it didn’t break any rules.
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