An EU Advocate General just dealt Google (GOOG, Financial) a blow, recommending the dismissal of its appeal and the upholding of a €4.124 billion Android antitrust fine.
Advocate General Juliane Kokott told the Court of Justice of the EU that Google leveraged its Android dominance—tying Play Store licenses to pre-installing Search and Chrome, enforcing anti-fragmentation clauses and using ad-revenue sharing—to lock out rivals and amass user data that further entrenched its search lead.
That original €4.34 billion penalty, handed down in July 2018, was trimmed to €4.124 billion in 2022 when the General Court struck the revenue-sharing violation. Google's appeal argued that the fine punished its innovation, but Kokott's non-binding opinion urges the CJEU to confirm the bulk of the Commission's ruling. The judges will now deliberate before issuing a final verdict.
This case tests the EU's muscle in reining in Big Tech's gatekeeper tactics. A confirmed fine would reinforce the Commission's playbook on bundling and platform gatekeeping, while any reversal could embolden dominant platforms to press narrow interpretation of competition law.
Expect a formal CJEU judgment later this year. That decision will send ripples through platform-regulator relations worldwide—and set the stakes for how far the EU will go to curb entrenched ecosystem power.
