Google Fined Almost €3 Billion By EU For Abusing Adtech Power

Alphabet Inc.'s Google was fined almost €3 billion ($3.5 billion) by the European Union and ordered to stop favoring its own advertising technology services, in a move that risks further inflaming tensions with US President Donald Trump.

The European Commission said Friday that Google had abused its dominance by giving its own ad exchanges a competitive advantage over rivals and that it must bring the practices to an end. 

"When markets fail, public institutions must act to prevent dominant players from abusing their power," EU antitrust commissioner Teresa Ribera said in a statement. "True freedom means a level-playing field, where everyone competes on equal terms and citizens have a genuine right to choose."

The company immediately vowed to appeal. Lee-Anne Mulholland, vice president for regulatory affairs at Google, said the move "imposes an unjustified fine and requires changes that will hurt thousands of European businesses by making it harder for them to make money".   

The EU punishment comes at a tense moment for EU–US trade relations, with Trump repeatedly deriding the bloc’s efforts to rein in Silicon Valley giants. Although Google faces antitrust scrutiny worldwide, it won some relief this week when a US judge ruled that its search business would not need to be broken up to address the harms alleged by the Department of Justice.

Google's ad-tech operations, however, also remain under threat in the US. The DOJ is expected to file proposed remedies later on Friday, ahead of a Sept. 22 hearing on those proposals. Previously, the department had floated forcing Google to divest its Ad Manager platform to tackle the alleged anti-competitive risks.

The EU warned Google in 2023 that it had abused its dominance in advertising technology to harm online publishers. At the time, the Brussels-based commission said Google had favored its own ad exchange program over its rivals and bolstered the company’s central role in the ad tech supply chain.

Ribera’s predecessor Margrethe Vestager warned then that only a "mandatory divestment" of part of its business would solve the issues. The Dane had spent a decade in Brussels, where she hit Google with fines of more than €8 billion across three different cases, although one penalty was annulled and another cut by EU judges.