PRESS RELEASE No 143/24

Luxembourg, 18 September 2024

Judgment of the General Court in Case T-334/19 | Google and Alphabet v Commission (Google AdSense for Search)

Google AdSense: The General Court annuls the Commission’s decision The General Court upholds the majority of the Commission’s findings but annuls the decision by which the Commission imposed a fine of almost €1.5 billion on Google, on the ground inter alia that it failed to take into consideration all the relevant circumstances in its assessment of the duration of the contract clauses that the Commission had deemed abusive

Google has operated since 2003 an advertising platform called AdSense. Google has developed in that regard various services including, in particular, an online advertising intermediation service called AdSense for Search (‘AFS’).

AFS allowed the publishers of websites containing integrated search engines to display ads linked to the online queries that users could submit on those websites. In that way, publishers could receive a part of the revenues generated by the display of those ads. To use AFS, publishers generating sufficient turnover could inter alia negotiate with Google a ‘Google Services Agreement’ (‘GSA’). GSAs however contained clauses restricting or prohibiting the display of ads from services competing with AFS.

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