The Court of Justice of the European Union has dismissed Google’s final appeal against a €4.1 billion antitrust fine, ending an eight-year fight over how the company built Android into a vehicle for its search and browser dominance. The ruling, handed down on Thursday, leaves the penalty intact and closes off any further judicial route for Google inside the bloc.
The case traces back to 2018, when the European Commission fined Google €4.34 billion for what it called illegal reinforcement of its search dominance.
Regulators found that Google made the Play Store available to phone makers only if they also pre-installed Google Search and Chrome, and paid some manufacturers and network operators to keep rival search apps off their devices entirely.
The Commission’s central complaint, as Bloomberg reported, was that Google used Android’s near-ubiquity to cement a monopoly it might not have held on the merits of search alone.
Google’s Android antitrust fight has run in parallel with a separate €2.4 billion shopping-services case, which the company also lost on appeal. Both cases sit inside the EU’s broader pattern of treating Google’s platform control as the problem, rather than any single product decision.
