Overview
- The Court of Justice of the European Union dismissed Google and Alphabet’s final appeal on Thursday, making the roughly €4.1 billion fine from the EU enforceable across the bloc.
- The penalty traces back to a 2018 European Commission finding that Google required phone makers to pre‑install Google Search and Chrome as a condition for Play Store licensing, a practice regulators said foreclosed rivals.
- A lower EU General Court largely upheld the Commission’s 2018 decision in 2022 and trimmed the fine slightly before the CJEU’s ruling closed all intra‑EU appeals.
- Google said it had changed its Android licensing in Europe to comply with the 2018 decision and argued its actions kept Android open, but the court upheld the Commission’s view that those arrangements amounted to an abuse of dominance.
- Beyond the fine, the judgment sets judicial precedent for how EU law treats bundling and tying in digital markets and arrives as Brussels deploys the Digital Markets Act and other probes to police big tech behaviour.