The second-highest court  of European Union gave the verdict of removing the fine of 1.5 billion euro charged by authorities on Google.

The verdict was appealed by the US tech giant. In 2019, the European Commission accused Alphabet-owned Google of abusing its market dominance with AdSense for Search. This tool enabled website owners to include adverts in the search results for their own pages.

Google works as a mediator, allowing marketers to sell adverts on third-party websites using search.

However, the Commission said that Google abused its market dominance by including a number of restrictive provisions in contracts with third-party websites, preventing competitors from running search adverts on these sites.

The commission imposed a fine of 1.49 billion euros on Google. Google filed an appeal, referring the issue to the EU‘s General Court. The court mentioned that it supported several pointers, however nullified the decision of imposing the said fine on Google. It clarified that the commission fell short of studying the right situation of assessment of the period of contract terms.

A Google official informed the sources that the company will carefully analyze the entire decision.
“This case concerns a relatively narrow subset of text-only search advertising displayed on a small number of publisher websites. We amended our contracts in 2016 to remove the relevant sections, even before the Commission’s ruling. We are glad that the court acknowledged flaws in the first ruling and reversed the fine,” the spokeswoman stated.

The Commission’s spokeswoman stated that it has taken note of the decision and will consider possible next steps. Google was not immediately available for comment.