LUXEMBOURG, July 3 — Europe’s top court on July 2 dismissed the final appeal from Google and parent company Alphabet in a decade-old Android antitrust battle, upholding a fine of about €4.125 billion (roughly $4.67 billion) originally levied by EU competition regulators in 2018. The ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Luxembourg brings a legally binding end to what remains one of the largest antitrust penalties ever imposed on a single company in the bloc.
The case dates back to July 2018, when the European Commission concluded a multi-year investigation and determined that Google had used the dominant position of its Android mobile operating system to entrench its search engine on smartphones and tablets. Regulators found three main forms of anti-competitive conduct: the tying of Google Search and the Chrome browser to the licensing of the Google Play Store; payments to certain device makers and mobile network operators in exchange for exclusive pre-installation of Google Search; and restrictions preventing manufacturers from selling devices running non-Google-approved Android forks. The Commission set the original fine at €4.34 billion, a record at the time.
Google appealed, and in September 2022 the EU’s General Court largely confirmed the Commission’s findings while partially annulling the assessment relating to certain revenue-sharing arrangements. The lower court reduced the fine to €4.125 billion but kept the core finding of abuse of a dominant position intact. Google then took the case to the CJEU, arguing that Android had always been free and open, that pre-installation did not stop users from removing apps or changing defaults, and that competition from Apple’s iOS should have been more fully accounted for.
In its decision, the CJEU rejected those arguments and dismissed the appeal in full. The court stated that the General Court had committed no error of assessment in concluding that Google’s pre-installation and anti-fragmentation requirements were capable of restricting competition and reinforced its dominance within the Android ecosystem. According to the court, the argument that Google should be judged only against the yardstick of an “as-efficient competitor” was not applicable in a market already shaped by Google’s dominance. The ruling is final and cannot be appealed further; Google is required to pay the remaining balance of the fine within three months of the judgment.
Google said it was disappointed with the outcome. In a written statement, the company said the decision failed to give sufficient weight to the investments it had made to keep Android open, interoperable and free for users, developers and device makers, and it noted that it had already changed its commercial arrangements after the 2018 decision to align with European competition rules. Alphabet shares were little changed in pre-market trading following the ruling.
The Android verdict adds to a series of European antitrust actions against the company. In earlier cases, the European Commission imposed penalties of €2.42 billion in 2017 over the Google Shopping comparison service and €1.49 billion in 2019 over restrictions in the AdSense for Search product. In 2025, the Commission also fined Alphabet €2.95 billion in an advertising-technology investigation, a decision Google has said it plans to challenge. Taken together, these cases put the company’s cumulative European competition penalties at close to €11 billion, before any further action under the Digital Markets Act, under which EU officials have opened separate probes into Google’s self-preferencing in search results and its handling of app-store rules.
The judgment also lands against a wider transatlantic backdrop. In June, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to impose 100 percent tariffs on countries that maintain digital services taxes targeting American companies, a category that includes several EU member states. European officials have said they will respond to any such measures, and civil-society groups in Brussels welcomed Thursday’s ruling as reinforcing the bloc’s ability to enforce its own competition rulebook against the world’s largest technology firms. For Google, the case closes one chapter of European antitrust litigation while opening the door to further scrutiny of its search, advertising and app-store businesses in the years ahead.
