EU Court Adviser Says Google's $1.7 Billion AdSense Fine Should Return

An adviser to the European Union's top court has proposed reviving the European Commission's fine of almost 1.5 billion euros (about $1.7 billion) on Google, arguing that a lower court was wrong to scrap the 2019 penalty over the AdSense advertising business. Advocate General Juliane Kokott said on Thursday that the General Court erred in September 2024 when it annulled the sanction, and she proposed that the Court of Justice set that judgment aside and send the case back for a fresh ruling.

Her opinion is not binding, but the Court of Justice often follows such advice. Reuters reported that the judges are now deliberating and that a ruling in case C-826/24 P is expected next year.

What was the AdSense case about?

The dispute concerns AdSense for Search, a product that let websites with their own search boxes display Google search advertisements and share the resulting revenue. From March 2009, Google's template contracts with those sites contained exclusivity, placement and prior-authorization clauses. Those terms restricted or outright barred advertisements from competing services.

Google dropped or amended the clauses in September 2016, after the Commission opened proceedings. In March 2019, the Commission found that Google had broken EU competition law across a decade, from 2006 to 2016, and imposed the fine of almost 1.5 billion euros.

The takeaway: the fine punished contract terms that locked rival search-ad services out of publisher websites for roughly ten years.

Why did the General Court annul the fine?

The General Court threw out the Commission's decision in September 2024. It reasoned that the Commission had not adequately examined how long the contracts lasted, and that without that analysis it had failed to show the clauses actually excluded rivals.

Kokott disagreed. She said the General Court "imposed excessive requirements" on the duration question and did not weigh contract duration against the other tests the Court of Justice uses to judge exclusive arrangements by dominant companies.

She also addressed the Commission's method directly. The Commission did not need to examine each contract one by one; assessing the significant contracts together, sometimes using averages, was enough in principle, she said.

In plain terms, the adviser believes the lower court demanded a level of contract-by-contract proof that EU case law does not require.

What happens to the fine now?

Kokott proposed referring the case back to the General Court because that court never ruled on some of Google's arguments, including its objections to the size of the penalty. A return to the lower court would give Google another chance to contest the amount.

The adviser also flagged one likely reduction. The fine "should be reduced" in any event, she said, because the Commission did not appeal the earlier finding that it had failed to show exclusionary effects in 2016. That concession means at least the final year of the infringement period is unlikely to carry full weight in any recalculated penalty.

The takeaway: even if the Commission wins, the final figure will probably land below the original 1.5 billion euros.

How does this fit Google's wider EU record?

The opinion arrives months after another significant defeat for the company. In July, the Court of Justice upheld Google's 4.125 billion euro Android fine, the largest of the EU's antitrust actions against it.

Reuters reported that Google has now received six EU antitrust penalties totaling 10.38 billion euros. The AdSense decision, if revived and upheld, would keep that total intact, though possibly at a lower amount after any reduction.

The Court of Justice's ruling next year will determine whether the Commission keeps a substantial portion of the AdSense penalty or sees another major decision slip away on procedural grounds.