EU fines Google $3.5 billion over adtech antitrust violations

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

Google shows adverts in search outcomes, but it surely additionally has a dominant place as a software program supplier for on-line advertisers and publishers seeking to promote advert area and place adverts. The Fee’s predominant problem is with the best way Google’s advert shopping for instruments (Google Advertisements and DV 360) work together with its advert trade software program (AdX) and advert writer servers (DFP) in seemingly preferential methods. Google seems to favor its AdX advert trade by “informing AdX upfront of the worth of the perfect bid from rivals which it needed to beat to win the public sale,” in response to the Fee. It additionally discovered that “Google Advertisements was avoiding competing advert exchanges and primarily inserting bids on AdX,” sustaining the dominance of Google’s advert trade even when an alternate is a greater possibility 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 regulation. That might simply be the positive, however may additionally embrace a pressured 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 offered to Engadget:

“The European Fee’s choice about our advert tech providers is mistaken and we’ll attraction. It imposes an unjustified positive and requires modifications that may harm 1000’s of European companies by making it tougher for them to generate income. There’s nothing anticompetitive in offering providers for advert patrons and sellers, and there are extra options to our providers than ever earlier than.”

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

For instance, a US courtroom discovered Google was in 2024, however a decide that the corporate would not need to unload 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 not less than one different advertising-related problem, but it surely stays to be seen if there’s any punishment that may really faze the corporate.