EU Hits Google With Modest AdTech Penalty

When the European Commission announces the penalties in an antitrust case involving Google’s AdTech business in the coming weeks, it will reportedly order the company to pay a “modest” fine and will not require it to sell part of its AdTech business.

The fine is likely to be less than the 4.3 billion euros the Commission ordered Google to pay in another case in 2018, Reuters reported Friday (Aug. 29), citing unnamed sources.

Asked about the report by Reuters, the Commission decline to comment, while Google pointed to a 2023 blog post in which it criticized the regulator’s interpretation of the AdTech sector, according to the report.

The report attributed the imposition of what it described as modest penalties to the approach of the new EU antitrust chief, Teresa Ribera, who it said focuses on getting companies to end anti-competitive practices rather than punishing them with big fines.

In the AdTech case, the European Commission accused Google of abusing its dominance in the online AdTech industry since 2014. The regulator alleged that the company had wielded its market power on both sides of the supply chain by showing favoritism toward its own ad exchange, AdX, in matching auctions.

Google argued that serving both advertisers and publishers is a common industry practice, competitors operate similar AdTech businesses catering to both sides of the market, and integrated technology stacks facilitate high-quality connections between advertisers and publishers.

According to Friday’s Reuters report, advertising revenue accounted for 75.6% of Google’s total revenue in 2024.

Google also faces pressure in the United States, where it is in a legal battle with the Justice Department, and a federal judge determined that the company unlawfully maintained monopolies in critical areas of the online ad industry.

It was reported in May that the Justice Department called for Google to divest some key components of its digital advertising business, including its AdX marketplace and its DFP ad-serving platform.

The Justice Department argued at the time in a court filing that such divestitures were essential to dismantle Google’s dominance and restore competition in the markets for ad exchanges and publisher ad servers.