Google Faces Renewed Risk of $1.65 Billion EU Penalty Over Ad Practices — Update

By Edith Hancock

Google faces a potential setback in the European Union after a legal advisor said judges in a lower tribunal should revisit a decision to scrap a roughly $1.65 billion fine antitrust officials handed to the company.

The European Commission fined Google 1.49 billion euros in 2019, saying it had abused its dominance as a search engine and an advertising broker by imposing restrictive terms in contracts with third-party websites. Google later appealed the penalty to the General Court--the EU's second-highest court. Judges largely sided with the commission but canceled the fine. That decision was then appealed at the Court of Justice of the European Union.

Advocate General Juliane Kokott, an advisor to the bloc's top court, said that judges were wrong to assess that officials failed to demonstrate any exclusionary effects of Google's contractual terms linked to its AdSense platform.

A Google spokesperson said that the company is reviewing the opinion. "The general court rightly annulled the original decision, finding that the [commission] had not demonstrated that our contracts restricted competition, and we look forward to the Court's final judgment to bring this long-running case to a close," they said.

Publishers can earn money by displaying adverts when readers use the search function on their websites. Google sells those ads through its AdSense for Search service, acting as the broker between advertisers and website owners. EU antitrust officials said in 2019 that the company placed restrictive clauses in contracts with third-party websites that prevented its competitors from placing their own search adverts on them. It said the alleged infringement came to an end in 2016, having spanned over a decade.

Google scored a rare win in 2024 when judges in the General Court annulled the fine, saying that officials incorrectly assessed the duration-of-contract clauses they said fell foul of EU antitrust rules. The company has racked up billions of euros-worth of penalties from Brussels' antitrust regulator in the last decade.

Google says the agreements at issue relate to a narrow subset of text-only search ads, that the clauses only applied to a limited number of websites and that those clauses were removed in 2016.

The search giant's advertising business has faced intense scrutiny from competition regulators globally.

Brussels' more recent moves to penalize Google have angered U.S. President Trump. EU officials dealt the company a 2.95 billion euro fine in September 2025 for allegedly abusing the dominance of its advertising-technology business, prompting Trump to threaten to open a Section 301 trade investigation "to nullify the unfair penalties" that he said are targeting American companies.

Write to Edith Hancock at edith.hancock@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 12, 2026 07:11 ET (12:11 GMT)