Google wins legal battle against $1.67 billion EU digital ad case

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has won a court challenge against a €1.5 billion ($1.67 billion) European Union antitrust fine imposed five years ago, a week after the tech giant lost a legal fight over a bigger penalty.

The European Union’s General Court on Wednesday upheld the majority of the Commission’s findings in the digital ad case, but annulled the decision by which the Commission imposed the fine of €1.5 billion on Google targeting its online advertising business, it said in a statement.

The General Court stated that the Commission “committed errors in its assessment of the duration of the clauses at issue, as well as of the market covered by them in 2016.”

According to the statement, the Commission, the bloc’s top antitrust enforcer, “has also not demonstrated that the clauses in question had, first, possibly deterred innovation, next, helped Google to maintain and strengthen its dominant position on the national markets for online search advertising at issue and, last, that they had possibly harmed consumers.”

Last week, the European Union’s top court upheld a fine of €2.42 billion ($2.7 billion) imposed on Google (GOOG) for abuse of its dominant position by favouring its own comparison shopping service.