Google loses appeal against record €4.1bn EU fine over Android
A Google spokesperson said the judgement "fails to recognise" the firm's "significant investment to ensure Android remains open.".
VERDICT — CONFIRMED
Google has lost its appeal against a record €4.1bn European Union antitrust fine over Android, the Financial Times reported on 2 July.
A Google spokesperson said the judgement “fails to recognise” the firm's “significant investment to ensure Android remains open,” per the FT. The ruling was carried the same day by BBC News, CNBC and RFI; RFI's account described the decision as the end of Google's final appeal against the record €4.1bn fine, and CNBC's coverage identified the fine's bearer as Android's owner, Alphabet.
The corroborating coverage places the judgement at the close of a case that has run for the better part of a decade, one of three landmark EU competition actions against the company. Neither the FT's account nor the corroborating reports, as supplied, detail the court's reasoning.
Background
The fine originates in a July 2018 decision by the European Commission, the EU's competition enforcer, which penalised Google €4.34bn — at the time the largest antitrust fine it had ever imposed — for using Android's dominance to entrench its search engine. The Commission found that Google illegally required smartphone makers to pre-install Google Search and the Chrome browser as a condition of licensing its Play Store, paid manufacturers and mobile operators for exclusive pre-installation, and blocked makers from selling devices running unapproved Android variants. Android runs on the large majority of the world's smartphones.
Google challenged the decision at the EU's General Court, which in September 2022 upheld the Commission's findings in most respects while trimming the penalty to €4.125bn. Google then appealed to the European Court of Justice, the bloc's highest court, whose judgements on such appeals are final; no further avenue exists within the EU legal order.
What comes next
If the ruling is final, as RFI's characterisation indicates, Google's options within the EU court system are exhausted, leaving payment of the fine and continued compliance with the 2018 remedies. Android's distribution practices remain subject to the EU's ongoing platform-regulation regime for designated gatekeepers, so the Commission's scrutiny of the operating system does not end with this case.
