(November 28, 2024, 15:40 GMT | Insight) — The European Commission will seek to overturn a court defeat against Google from Sept. 18, where the search-advertising company won the annulment of a 1.49 billion euro ($1.57 billion) fine, MLex has learned.

The regulator is understood to be planning an appeal to the EU’s Court of Justice to contest the earlier ruling.

The EU’s lower-tier General Court annulled the original fine that was levied on Google for abusing its market power through the AdSense advertising service.

Google’s AdSense for Search platform included restrictive contracts with intermediaries that allowed Google to reserve premium space for its own adverts, and to veto ads from other providers, the commission concluded.

But, in September, EU judges ruled investigators had failed to properly assess the clauses in Google’s contracts that were allegedly abusive, including whether the clauses actually locked-in the tech giant’s customers.

“The European Commission has not demonstrated that the clauses in question had been capable of deterring publishers from sourcing from Google’s competing intermediaries,” the court said at the time.

While judges sided with the commission on most of its findings, they homed in on an error in assessing the duration of the contract clauses under scrutiny and the section of the market covered for the year 2016.

So, judges annulled the regulator’s decision because the clauses were not sufficiently identified as individual antitrust abuses.

An appeal is possible on points of law — rather than a full re-hearing of the facts of the case — to the EU’s Court of Justice.

The General Court case number was T-334/19.

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