“The fight between the EU and the United States against the digital giants is a long march”

Lhe antitrust weather looks stormy for Google this fall. On Monday, September 9, the trial brought by the Department of Justice for abuse of a dominant position and anticompetitive practices in its online advertising management tools began in the United States. In August, the company was convicted for imposing its search engine unduly on smartphones, thanks to contracts worth tens of billions of dollars with Apple. And on Tuesday, Google saw the European Court of Justice confirm the €2.4 billion fine imposed by Brussels for favoring its Google Shopping product comparison tool on its search engine.

On the same day, another digital giant suffered a major setback: Apple must repay 13 billion euros to Dublin for undue tax advantages, the European justice system ruled. Should we see this as a sign that, on both sides of the Atlantic, a storm is brewing for tech multinationals, fueled by the breath of the American and European competition authorities?

The picture is actually much more nuanced. The fight between Brussels and Washington against the digital giants is a long march. The sanctions confirmed by the European courts were decided in 2016 and 2017, for facts that were even earlier. These decisions by the Competition Commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, are only confirmed today because Google and Apple have contested them several times. The search engine has also appealed its August conviction.

Moreover, the trial opened on Monday only concerns its advertising management tools, particularly for advertisers and third-party sites, an area where it is accused of favouring its own media (including YouTube). The group is certainly liable for significant damages and a possible “dismantling”, but the latter would only concern this technical activity, marginal compared to the advertising on its engine. Furthermore, the group has already been condemned in France for these same practices.

More broadly, Google is currently the only digital giant to have been brought to trial since the change in attitude of the American authorities after the Cambridge Analytica scandal targeting Facebook and the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Subsequently, a series of procedures were launched by the Department of Justice against Apple for its mobile ecosystem in March 2024 or by the Federal Trade Commission against Amazon, for its e-commerce platform in 2023, and against Facebook, now Meta, for its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp… in 2012 and 2014.

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