EU Court Adviser Backs the $1.7 Billion Google Antitrust Fine

Google suffered a setback on November 12, 2026, when an adviser to Europe's top court said a lower tribunal was wrong to scrap a €1.49 billion ($1.7 billion) antitrust fine against the company over its online advertising practices. The opinion, from Advocate General Juliane Kokott of the Court of Justice of the European Union, recommends that the 2024 annulment be overturned and the case sent back for a fresh look.

The court's judges usually follow the majority of such recommendations, and a final ruling is expected next year. The opinion is not binding, but it shifts the odds sharply back toward the European Commission, the EU's competition watchdog, which imposed the fine in 2019.

What Happened

The case concerns Google AdSense, the service through which Google places search advertisements on third-party websites. In its 2019 decision, the European Commission found that Google had used restrictive clauses in its contracts with publishers that prevented rival advertising brokers from placing search advertisements on those publishers' websites. The Commission said the clauses reinforced Google's dominance in online search advertising, and fined the company €1.49 billion.

Google appealed to the General Court, the EU's second-highest court. In 2024, that court largely sided with the Commission's reasoning but annulled the fine, concluding that the Commission had not adequately demonstrated the exclusionary effects of the contractual terms. The Commission appealed to the Court of Justice of the European Union, the bloc's highest court, which is where the case now sits as C-826/24 P Commission v Google and Alphabet (Google AdSense).

Advocate General Kokott said the General Court had imposed excessive requirements on the Commission's examination of the duration of the conduct, and had not sufficiently related its conclusion to the criteria that determine whether a company holds a dominant market position.

A Long History of EU Fines

The AdSense fine is one of six EU antitrust penalties that have cost Google €10.38 billion over nearly two decades, according to Reuters. That total makes the company the most heavily fined in the history of EU competition enforcement, and the AdSense case is the last of the major legacy cases still working its way through the courts.

The significance goes beyond the money. The AdSense decision was part of a sequence of Commission actions that defined how European regulators think about dominant digital platforms: first the shopping-search case, then the Android case, then AdSense. Each one tested a different mechanism by which a dominant company could, in the Commission's view, use contracts and defaults to keep rivals out.

The General Court's 2024 annulment was a rare win for Google in that sequence, and it briefly suggested the Commission's older cases might unravel on appeal. Kokott's opinion points the other way. If the Court of Justice follows her recommendation, the annulment will be set aside and the fine — or a re-examination of it — will be back on the table.

Why It Matters

For founders and investors, the case is a live lesson in regulatory risk. The conduct at issue dates back years, the fine was imposed in 2019, and the litigation is still unresolved in late 2026. A company can be litigating a single competition decision for the better part of a decade, with the financial exposure hanging over it the whole time. That is the timeline founders should assume when they build businesses that depend on a dominant platform's rules.

The opinion also matters because it signals how the EU's highest court is likely to treat the Commission's evidence in dominance cases. Kokott's argument — that the lower court asked for too much proof of exclusionary effect — if adopted, would make it easier for the Commission to sustain fines against dominant companies in future cases, including the newer wave of enforcement under the Digital Markets Act.

For startups that compete with or depend on Google, the practical takeaway is narrower but real. The AdSense clauses at the heart of the case restricted what publishers could do with rival ad brokers on their own websites.

What This Means for Founders and Investors

For investors, the case is a reminder that regulatory exposure is a valuation factor, not a footnote. When diligence turns up an open competition investigation, price it as a multi-year overhang, not a one-off cost.

For founders, the broader lesson is that Europe's competition regime rewards businesses that can operate without permission from a dominant gatekeeper. Every restriction a platform imposes on its partners is a market opportunity for someone building an alternative route to the same customer.

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