EU fines Google $3.5 billion over adtech antitrust violations

The European Fee has announced that it’s going to high quality Google €2.95 billion, or round $3.5 billion, for violating European Union antitrust legal guidelines and “distorting competitors within the promoting expertise trade.” The choice follows from earlier in 2025, the place a US federal choose concluded that Google maintains a monopoly in internet advertising expertise.

Google shows advertisements in search outcomes, nevertheless it additionally has a dominant place as a software program supplier for on-line advertisers and publishers seeking to promote advert area and place advertisements. The Fee’s important difficulty is with the way in which Google’s advert shopping for instruments (Google Advertisements and DV 360) work together with its advert change software program (AdX) and advert writer servers (DFP) in seemingly preferential methods. Google seems to favor its AdX advert change by “informing AdX upfront of the worth of the very best bid from rivals which it needed to beat to win the public sale,” based on the Fee. It additionally discovered that “Google Advertisements was avoiding competing advert exchanges and primarily putting bids on AdX,” sustaining the dominance of Google’s advert change even when another is a greater choice for advertisers.

The Fee is giving Google 60 days to share the way it plans to deal with these points or face an “applicable treatment” for violating antitrust legislation. That might simply be the high quality, however may additionally embody a compelled sale of some or all of Google’s adtech enterprise.

Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s International Head of Regulatory Affairs, shared that the corporate will attraction the choice within the following assertion supplied to Engadget:

“The European Fee’s resolution about our advert tech providers is unsuitable and we are going to attraction. It imposes an unjustified high quality and requires modifications that may damage hundreds of European companies by making it tougher for them to become profitable. There’s nothing anticompetitive in offering providers for advert consumers and sellers, and there are extra options to our providers than ever earlier than.”

$3.5 billion is a staggering amount of cash, nevertheless it’s not technically probably the most Google’s been charged for violating EU legal guidelines. In 2018, the corporate was for forcing cell community operators to pre-install Google apps on telephones. Although Google has been below an growing quantity of scrutiny within the final decade for its enterprise practices, it to date hasn’t confronted many structural cures for what has been known as anticompetitive conduct.

For instance, a US courtroom discovered Google was in 2024, however a choose that the corporate would not need to dump Chrome or cease paying Apple to make Google the iPhone’s default search engine. EU regulators have traditionally been extra persistent than their US counterparts, and the European Fee is for at the least one different advertising-related difficulty, nevertheless it stays to be seen if there’s any punishment that may truly faze the corporate.