Google’s record Android EU fine won’t be overturned, confirms court
The EU hit Google with a record fine back in 2018. At the heart of the problem, EU antitrust investigator Margrethe Vestager found that Google was misusing its power over the Android ecosystem. The fine was joined by a number of changes forced upon Android in the EU, allowing some companies to launchAndroid forks without Google appsmore easily. Naturally, Google disagrees that the fine is justified, and so the company has been fighting against it in court for years. That court has now ruled that the fine was mostly justified, reducing it only ever so slightly by €200 million (~$200 million).
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While the fine was still up to debate all this time, Google was forced to take actions to rectify the problems identified by the EU. Google had to introduce the option for those living in the EU to choose their preferred search engine when they first set up their devices, and it had to allow its partners to work on forked Android versions while still providing them with its bundled Android and Google services package. This is the reason why Fairphone can offerde-googled versions of its phonesrunning /e/OS in Europe, for example.
The EU has investigated Google in this matter since 2013, when the FairSearch coalition first complained about the practice. FairSearch is a non-profit organization that lobbies against Google’s stranglehold on search and other business areas. It is controlled by Oracle executives, and many of its members are in the same market as Google, like Expedia, TripAdvisor, and Expedia. At some point, Microsoft was also a supporter of the group.
The Android fine isn’t the only penalty that Google received in recent years. In another 2021 court hearing, a $2.8 billion fine was upheld revolving around Google abusing its dominant position in the search market to promote its own services. There are countless other cases against Google and other big tech companies, too.
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