EU's highest court to rule on Google's record €4.1 billion Android fine

Europe's highest court is set to draw the final line under one of the longest antitrust battles in the history of Big Tech, as the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg prepares to rule on the record €4.125 billion fine imposed on Google for abusing the dominance of its Android operating system.

The judgment, expected on Thursday, is the last word in a case that opened with a European Commission decision in 2018. Unlike the lower court whose ruling it reviews, the Court of Justice sits at the apex of the EU legal order: its decision is final and cannot be appealed, meaning the ruling will settle the size of the penalty once and for all.

Most of the signals point one way. In June 2025, the Court's own legal adviser, Advocate General Juliane Kokott, urged the judges to dismiss Google's appeal in its entirety and let the fine stand. Such opinions are not binding, but the Court follows them in roughly four cases out of five — a track record that has left many competition lawyers expecting Google to lose.

A record fine born in 2018

The saga began on 18 July 2018, when the Commission fined Google €4.34 billion — then, and still, the largest antitrust penalty the EU has ever imposed on a single company. Regulators concluded that Google had used the near-ubiquity of Android, which runs on the vast majority of the world's smartphones, to entrench its search engine. The Commission identified three practices:

requiring phone makers to pre-install the Google Search app and the Chrome browser as a condition of licensing the Play Store;

paying large manufacturers and mobile networks to pre-install Google Search exclusively; and

blocking manufacturers that wanted Google's apps from also selling devices running rival, unapproved versions of Android known as "forks".

Announcing the penalty, the then competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager framed the case as a defence of consumer choice in the mobile market.

In this way, Google has used Android as a vehicle to cement the dominance of its search engine.

From €4.34 billion to €4.125 billion

Google challenged the decision at the EU's General Court, the lower of the two Luxembourg courts. On 14 September 2022 the judges largely sided with Brussels, upholding the core findings that Google had illegally tied its apps together and obstructed rival versions of Android. But they faulted parts of the Commission's analysis of the exclusivity payments and trimmed the fine to €4.125 billion.

Neither side was satisfied. Google took the case up to the Court of Justice, where it is registered as C-738/22 P, arguing that the penalty punished success rather than wrongdoing. At the hearing, the company's lawyer Alfonso Lamadrid told the court the Commission had overreached. "In this case, the Commission failed to discharge its burden and its responsibility and, relying on multiple errors of law, punished Google for its superior merits, attractiveness and innovation," he said, adding that the contested agreements "did not restrict competition, they fostered it".

Advocate General Kokott was unpersuaded. She concluded that Google held a dominant position across several Android-related markets and had leveraged it to strengthen Google Search, and recommended that the appeal be rejected — the step that set up Thursday's ruling.

Across the three cases that defined Europe's first wave of tech antitrust, Brussels levied more than €8.2 billion in fines on Google between 2017 and 2019. Google has always maintained that Android expanded choice by giving manufacturers a free, open operating system and consumers cheaper devices, and that its deals were ordinary commercial practice. Since 2018 it has unbundled some of the contested apps and begun charging licence fees for others in Europe, changes it says answer the Commission's concerns.

What it means for the DMA era

The ruling matters far beyond Google's balance sheet. The Android case sits alongside the €2.42 billion Google Shopping fine — upheld by the Court of Justice in September 2024 — and a €1.49 billion penalty over search advertising that the General Court annulled the same month. Together they tested how far the Commission could push case-by-case competition law against dominant digital platforms, and the mixed scorecard shows Europe's judges do not rubber-stamp every decision from Brussels.

That case-by-case approach has since been overtaken by the Digital Markets Act, the EU's forward-looking rulebook whose obligations began applying in March 2024. The DMA designates the largest platforms as "gatekeepers" — Alphabet among them — and simply bans practices such as self-preferencing and forced bundling, rather than requiring regulators to prove abuse over the better part of a decade, as they did with Android.

A judgment upholding the fine would hand the Commission a powerful precedent as it polices those new rules, confirming that its reading of dominance and bundling survives scrutiny at the highest level. It would also underline Luxembourg's role as the venue where the limits of Europe's tech crackdown are ultimately fixed. For Google, which has already begun reshaping how Android and its apps operate in Europe to comply with the DMA, the practical stake is less the money than the legal endorsement the ruling would give to a decade of enforcement — and, with its own Advocate General having recommended defeat, the company goes into the judgment as the underdog.