EU’s top court urged to dismiss Google appeal
An adviser to the EU’s highest court has said that it should dismiss an appeal by Google against a fine of €4.1 billion set by a lower court.
The Android case centres on an initial fine of €4.3 billion imposed by the European Commission in 2018, after it found that Google had abused its dominant position by imposing anti-competitive contractual restrictions on manufacturers of mobile devices and on mobile-network operators.
Google challenged the decision before the EU’s lower General Court, which lowered the fine to €4.1 billion after annulling one of the commission’s three findings – linked to revenue-sharing arrangements – against the tech giant.
Arguments ‘ineffective’
The company then lodged a challenge with the Court of Justice, whose Advocate General Juliane Kokott said that the lower court’s assessment of the facts and evidence could not, in principle, be challenged before the Court of Justice.
She also described the firm’s legal arguments as “ineffective”.
On the bundling of Google’s Play Store with Google Search and Chrome, the advocate general said that the General Court was not obliged to require the commission to analyse the state of competition in the absence of such bundling.
‘Status quo bias’
“The General Court was entitled to confine itself to finding that the decision of users to use Google Search and Chrome, rather than non-competing apps, was influenced in a discriminatory way by the ‘status quo bias’ associated with their pre-installation,” she found.
The advocate general also argued that the lower court was correct to hold that there was still a single and continuous infringement, despite the annulment of one element of the commission’s decision.
She also found that the General Court also did not err in recalculating the amount of the fine.
The opinion is not binding, and the Court of Justice will give its judgment at a later date.