European Union regulators on Friday hit Google with a 2.95 billion euro ($3.5 billion) fine for breaching the bloc’s competition rules by favouring its own digital advertising services, marking the fourth such antitrust penalty for the company as well as a retreat from previous threats to break up the tech giant.
The European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive branch and top antitrust enforcer, also ordered the US tech giant to end its “self-preferencing practices” and take steps to stop “conflicts of interest” along the advertising technology supply chain.
Google said the decision was “wrong” and that it would appeal.
“It imposes an unjustified fine and requires changes that will hurt thousands of European businesses by making it harder for them to make money,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, the company’s global head of regulatory affairs, said in a statement.
The decision was long overdue, coming more than two years after the European Commission announced antitrust charges against Google.
Legal woes
Friday's announcement marked the third fine in a week against the Alphabet-owned Google.
A US federal jury on Wednesday ordered Google to pay about $425 million for gathering information from smartphone app use even when people opted for privacy settings.
The same day, France's data protection authority fined the search giant 325 million euros for failing to respect the law on internet cookies.
The group notched a major win however on Tuesday when a US judge rejected the American government's demand that Google sell its Chrome web browser as part of an antitrust case.
The landmark ruling, which came after Google was found to have illegally maintained monopolies in online search through exclusive distribution agreements, did however impose sweeping requirements to restore competition in the area.
