Google just lost its last card. On July 2, the Court of Justice of the European Union rejected the tech giant’s final appeal in case C-738/22 P, upholding a €4.1 billion fine for anti-competitive practices tied to its Android operating system. The penalty stands as one of the largest antitrust fines ever levied against a single company in Europe.
The ruling closes out an eight-year legal saga that began when the European Commission first slapped Google with a €4.34 billion fine in July 2018. That original amount was trimmed slightly in earlier proceedings, but the core finding remained intact: Google abused its dominant position in mobile operating systems to tilt the playing field in favor of its own services.
What Google actually did
The crux of the case centers on something most Android users have taken for granted: the apps that come pre-loaded on their phones. The European Commission found that Google required device manufacturers to pre-install Google Search and the Chrome browser on Android devices as a condition for accessing the Google Play Store.
Beyond the pre-installation requirements, Google also imposed restrictions on manufacturers that limited their ability to sell devices running alternative versions of Android. These so-called “anti-fragmentation” agreements effectively prevented competitors from gaining any foothold in the mobile ecosystem, even on a forked version of the operating system Google technically offers as open-source software.
