The Paris Court of Appeal confirmed on Thursday April 7 the fine of 150 million euros imposed by the Competition Authority more than two years ago against Google.
The case concerns the advertising platform of the American giant Google Ads, whose rules imposed on advertisers were deemed "
opaque and difficult to understand
".
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The competition policeman at the time accused the American giant, in a dominant position in the advertising market, of discriminating against certain companies by applying
its rules in
an “unfair and random manner” .
The Authority had been seized in 2015 by the company Gibmedia, publisher of several sites (Info-meteo.fr, Pages-annonce.net and Annuaires-inverse.net), after the suspension of its account on Google Ads, which it used to monetize its sites by displaying advertising campaigns.
Google then explained that Gibmedia ran advertisements for websites encouraging users to pay for services that were otherwise available free of charge, or at a lower cost from official sources.
The problem is that if GibMedia saw its account suspended for such reasons, other sites with identical operating modes could continue to use Google Ads.
It is precisely this
“opaque”
operation , inducing a “
double standard
”, that the Competition Authority sanctioned in 2019. This sanction is now validated by the Paris Court of Appeal.
Avalanche of procedures
Google was quick to react Thursday to this latest court decision.
A spokesperson cites the same reasons as at the time to justify the suspension of the Gibmedia account.
"
We don't want these types of misleading ads on our platform, which is why we suspended Gibmedia to protect our users from harmful consequences
," he said.
The platform explains that following the initial decision of the Competition Authority, it had already made changes to make its rules "
even clearer
".
“We are now going to take the time to analyze the decision before considering the next steps”
, abounds the firm.
On the Old Continent, Google is beginning to accumulate decisions for abuse of a dominant position.
The European Commission has, on several occasions, sanctioned the Mountain View firm for this reason.
In early March, Brussels opened a new investigation into Google and Facebook, which it suspects of having jointly manipulated the online advertising auction system to skew competition.
Beyond that, Google is under heavy attack in the United States, where the company is the target of an antitrust investigation led by nearly fifty attorneys general.