Google Said to Face Third EU Antitrust Fine Within Weeks

Google Said to Face Third EU Antitrust Fine Within Weeks
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The curtain could soon fall on the last in a trilogy of European Union antitrust fines for Google, according to Bloomberg.

Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager is set to announce a penalty targeting the AdSense advertising service in the coming weeks, according to people familiar with the probe. Regulators were probing whether Google’s advertising contracts unfairly restricted rivals. The timing is tentative and could still be pushed back, the people said.

The penalty will mark the culmination, for now, of more than eight years of active antitrust investigation into the U.S. tech giant. The company has already racked up 6.7 billion euros in fines and faces a potential threat of more if it doesn’t obey EU orders to change its behavior.

The EU said in 2016 that Google hindered competition for online ads with its AdSense for Search product which places advertising on websites, including retailers, telecommunications operators and newspapers. While its European market share is more than 80 percent, AdSense contributed less than 20 percent of Google’s total ad revenue in 2015, a percentage which has declined steadily since 2010.

The commission in July fined Google a record 4.3 billion euros in the Android case, demanding that the company change the way it puts search and web-browser apps onto Android mobile devices. A year earlier, Google received a then-record 2.4 billion-euro penalty after regulators accused it of skewing results to thwart smaller shopping search services.

The fine is likely to be lower than in the previous cases, because Google has collaborated with the commission and has already introduced changes in AdSense, according to Aitor Ortiz, an analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence in London. “A fine isn’t likely to cause long-term harm to the company as AdSense has been replaced by other products,“ he said. “If you look at the annual reports, AdSense is less and less relevant.“