Europe Confirms Record €4.1B Penalty Against Google for Android Practices
Europe Confirms Record €4.1B Penalty Against Google for Android Practices
Publish Date: 2026-07-02 14:02:00
Source Domain: securityaffairs.com
Europe Confirms Record €4.1B Penalty Against Google for Android Practices
Pierluigi Paganini
July 02, 2026
EU’s top court upheld a €4.1B fine against Google, ruling it abused Android’s market dominance through restrictive licensing practices.
The Court of Justice of the European Union issued its ruling on July 2, 2026, and Google lost. The court dismissed the appeal brought by Google and its parent company Alphabet against an earlier judgment from the General Court, confirming a fine of €4,125,000,000. Alphabet is jointly and severally liable for €1,520,605,895 of that amount.
The case goes back to 2018, when the European Commission concluded that Google had abused its dominant market position through three categories of restrictions built into its Android licensing arrangements. Device manufacturers who wanted access to Google’s Play Store had to pre-install Google Search and Chrome. To get the licences needed for those apps, they also had to agree not to sell devices running Android versions that Google hadn’t approved. And Google paid manufacturers and mobile operators a share of its advertising revenue on the condition that they didn’t pre-install a competing search engine on a defined set of devices. The Commission concluded all three formed a single, coordinated strategy to protect Google’s search dominance, and fined the company €4,342,865,000.
The General Court reviewed the case in 2022 and agreed that the conduct was a single and continuous infringement. It annulled one piece of the Commission’s decision: the part dealing with revenue share agreements tied to the exclusive pre-installation of Google Search on a predefined device portfolio. That partial annulment led the court to recalculate the fine downward to €4.125 billion. Everything else held.
Google and Alphabet then appealed to the Court of Justice, the EU’s highest court, arguing the General…
