Google’s Third EU Antitrust Fine is Being Finalized

Alphabet Inc.’s Google is likely to be hit with a third EU antitrust fine. The fine is related to the company’s AdSense advertising service. The accusations are quite serious because Google is believed to have included preferences in a google bot tweak. This is a toolkit that is used for search engine ranking and for paid advertising pop-ups.

Google’s Third EU Antitrust Fine

The third antitrust fine opened by the European Commission in 2016 is accusing Google of preventing third parties of using its AdSense service from displaying products from their competitors. According to Reuters, Google had help 80% of the European market for search advertising intermediation over the previous ten years and that it had kept anti-competitive practices for a decade. The Android parent answered the accusations by changing the conditions in its AdSense contracts with large third-parties in order to make it possible for them to display competitive search ads.

The Case is Finalizing

The reason why Google is likely to get hit with a third EU antitrust fine is because European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager announced earlier this month that she is getting close to finalizing the case. In addition, the Commission declined to give any comments on Friday regarding the AdSense fine.

Record Fines

Margrethe Vestager is the one who gave Google the record 4.34 billion euro ($4.91 billion) fine because the Android parent used its Android mobile operating system in order to restrict competitors from advertising their products.

After the record fine, Google was fined once again with 2.4 billion euro in 2017 for blocking its competitors with comparison websites. With that said, Google is definitely going to get another expensive fine in the upcoming days. However, the fine is expected to be much lower in comparison with the previous ones.