Seat of the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) in Luxembourg.
Google has suffered a new setback in the European justice system. The EU Advocate General has supported the 2,424.5 million sanction imposed on him by the European Commission for competition violations, which was already ratified by the General Court of the EU (TGEU) in November 2021. Now all that remains is the highest body, the Court of Justice (ECJ), which in most cases tends to confirm the opinion of the Advocate General.
This fine on the tech giant is the third highest that the Commission has imposed for antitrust violations in a list in which Google clearly stands out. The search engine Alphabet also received the highest fine in history, 4,342.8 million, for abuse of dominance, ratified in the TGUE and awaiting the final decision, and another of almost 1,500 million. In addition, the American company has a file opened by the competition authority in which the original statement of objections calls for the division of the company due to its great dominance in the digital advertising market and the dominance of all links in the chain.
The specific case on which the German lawyer Juliane Kolkott gave her opinion this Thursday is based on the Commission's decision to fine Google for violating competition in the Internet search market and its own comparison service in the search engine preferred. of products compared to those of other companies.
“This resulted in users clicking on Google’s product comparison results more often than on competitors’ results. The subsequent redirection of traffic from Google's general results page was not due to a better quality of Google's product comparison service, but solely to self-preferential treatment and the leverage generated by Google's general results page – that is, to the abusive exploitation of its dominant position in the market for general search services on the Internet,” says the European judiciary’s statement on Kolkott’s report.
“The self-preferential treatment accused of Google constitutes an autonomous form of abuse through the application of unfair access conditions to competing product comparison services, provided that it produces at least potentially anti-competitive effects (as found by the Commission),” argues the lawyer, who concludes: that, given the nature of the abuse that they consider to be occurring, it is not necessary to “apply criteria to establish the existence of abuse through the denial of access to an 'essential resource'”. Finally, Kolkott points out that Google used “self-preferentiality” in its search engine to gain dominance over a market segment it did not have and to “give itself a competitive advantage.”
All of this leads the EU Advocate General to support the decisions of the European Commission and the TGEU and to call on the ECJ to do the same. Typically, the Union's highest general body follows the opinion – the technical term for these conclusions in European judicial proceedings – of the EU General Counsel. According to those most responsible for the functioning of the Community justice system, this is typically the case in 80% of cases. However, there are exceptions even in high-profile cases. The last – and most recent – was that of UEFA and FIFA against the Euroleague soccer team. The ECJ ruling can be described as a complement to the entire opinion of the Advocate General, who in this case was not the German Kolkott, but the Greek Athanasios Rantos.
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