Google has been hit with a €2.9 billion fine by the European Commission, for breaching competition laws by unfairly pushing its own advertising services, to the detriment of competitors.
The financial penalty follows an investigation by the European Union’s powerful executive arm, which has used its antitrust laws to try to rein in US tech multinationals and social media giants over the last decade.
Google has said it intends to appeal the decision.
United States president Donald Trump criticised the fine, writing on social media that “the American Taxpayer will not stand for it!”
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“This is on top of the many other Fines and Taxes that have been issued against Google and other American Tech Companies, in particular,” Mr Trump said. “As I have said before, my Administration will NOT allow these discriminatory actions to stand.”
He threatened to initiate proceedings under section 301 of the US Trade Act “to nullify the unfair penalties”.
The commission investigation found Google had distorted the online advertising industry, by unfairly favouring its own services over rivals in the adtech sector.
The commission said it had ordered Google “to bring these self-preferencing practices to an end”. The US tech multinational, whose main source of revenue comes from selling online advertising, was fined €2.95 billion by the commission.
In a statement, Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice-president for regulatory affairs, said the commission’s decision was wrong and the company would appeal it.
“It imposes an unjustified fine and requires changes that will hurt thousands of European businesses by making it harder for them to make money,” she said.
“There’s nothing anticompetitive in providing services for ad buyers and sellers, and there are more alternatives to our services than ever before,” she said.
The commission decision could force Google to break-up part of its adtech business, if it is not overturned on appeal in what could become a lengthy fight in the European Court of Justice.
The decision to levy the fine on Google was a point of tension at the top level of the commission in recent days.
Teresa Ribera, the EU’s competition chief, is said to have come up against pressure to delay hitting Google with a hefty fine, from EU trade commissioner Maros Sefcovic, a key figure in the recent deal on tariffs negotiated between Brussels and Washington.
Some inside the commission are concerned that moving ahead with financial penalties on US tech firms, for breaches of EU competition rules or the union’s new digital regulations, risk upending a fragile truce that headed off an EU-US tariff war.
Mr Trump has frequently criticised EU fines of US tech multinationals as unfair and punitive.
The US president recently threatened to levy extra import tariffs of countries who used digital regulations to target US companies.
This latest EU case centres on adverts Google gets paid to place on the websites of newspapers and other sites, rather than ads that appear within lists of Google search results.
The commission’s inquiry found Google was unfairly protecting its own adtech service that matches advertisers with available ad space on other websites, hindering rival companies from elbowing into the market.
The EU body has given the search engine giant 60 days to come forward with proposals to address the “inherent conflicts of interest,” in its role as an online advertising middleman.
Google clashed with the commission’s enforcers on several occasions when Margrethe Vestager was the EU’s competition chief. The Danish politician used the bloc’s powerful antitrust rules to take several high-profile cases against Big Tech.
Google was previously fined €2.4 billion by the commission in 2017 for abusing its dominance as the world’s most popular search engine.
The US multinational was hit with a further €4.3 billion sanction for anticompetitive practices, connected to its Android mobile phone operating systems the following year.
Another €1.4 billion fine handed down to the company in 2019 for crowding out rival advertising services was later overturned in the courts.
