BRUSSELS — The European Union should try to stay consistent with authorities elsewhere as it decides whether to order a breakup of Google’s advertising business, the bloc’s competition chief told POLITICO. Teresa Ribera’s call for reflection marks a shift from the European Commission’s line a year ago that Google should break itself up, as the EU executive imposed a €2.95 billion fine for abuse of dominance in advertising. The U.S. search giant countered in November with a proposal of behavioral remedies only.
Her remarks on the need for regulatory alignment are especially significant as they come only days after a U.S. judge declined to force Google to sell its ad exchange. The Commission has not yet seen the judge’s reasoning, which remains under seal, and Ribera said it was “respectfully curious” to read it. President Donald Trump threatened a trade investigation into the EU within a day of Brussels fining Google €890 million in July under the Digital Markets Act.
His trade representative, Jamieson Greer, has called the Commission’s recent actions on Android and Search a de facto forced technology transfer.At the same time, U.S. courts have been imposing remedies in Big Tech cases that go further than some of the measures Brussels has pursued. In Europe, where similar conduct drew a €500 million fine under the Digital Markets Act, the Commission in August accepted Apple’s revised terms, which will still allow the company to charge a fee on purchases made through external links.“It’s a weird dynamic,” said Gene Burrus, global policy counsel for the Coalition for App Fairness, a developer group founded by Epic and Spotify. The wild card, he said, is a U.S. court acting in response to private litigation, with the U.S. government not part of it at all.
So far, in the major Google cases, U.S. courts have declined to order a breakup. District Judge Leonie Brinkema found last April that Google had monopolized parts of the ad tech market, but then refused to order a divestiture. In a separate case, Judge Amit Mehta similarly found that Google had operated an illegal search monopoly, then declined to make Google sell Chrome.
On this side of the Atlantic, the Commission has been left to grapple with the implications of both cases. Ribera said a decision on possible remedies in Google’s advertising case would come in the next few months and would rest on “our own capacities, assessments, and the compliance with our laws.” As for the Google search monopolization case, which does not have as direct a parallel in the EU, the Commission has nonetheless explored data-sharing remedies under the Digital Markets Act that would echo measures sought by U.S. authorities.
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