EU's top court upholds €4.1 billion Google Android fine, closing an eight-year legal battle

The European Union's highest court on Thursday dismissed Google's final appeal against a record antitrust fine over its Android mobile operating system, confirming a penalty of €4.125 billion and closing one of the longest-running chapters in Brussels' campaign against Big Tech.

Sitting on the Kirchberg plateau in Luxembourg City, the Court of Justice of the European Union rejected every ground of appeal brought by Google and its parent company Alphabet against a 2022 lower-court judgment, according to the court's press release on Case C-738/22 P. The ruling is final: no further appeal is possible.

"The Court of Justice dismisses the appeal brought by Google and Alphabet against that judgment of the General Court, thereby confirming the penalty imposed on them, as revised by the General Court, for their anticompetitive practices relating to the Android operating system," the court said.

What Google was punished for

The case dates back to July 2018, when the European Commission fined Google €4,342,865,000 — then the largest antitrust penalty in EU history — for abusing the dominance of Android, which runs on the great majority of the world's smartphones. The Commission found a "single and continuous infringement" built on three sets of contractual restrictions:

Distribution agreements that required phone makers to pre-install Google Search and the Chrome browser as a condition for licensing the must-have Play Store;

Anti-fragmentation agreements that barred manufacturers from selling devices running versions of Android not approved by Google;

Revenue share agreements that paid manufacturers and mobile operators a slice of advertising revenue in exchange for not pre-installing rival search services.

In September 2022, the EU's General Court largely upheld that decision but annulled the strand concerning the revenue share agreements, trimming the fine to €4.125 billion, of which Alphabet is jointly and severally liable for roughly €1.52 billion. It is that revised penalty the Court of Justice has now confirmed.

A judgment with doctrinal weight

Beyond the headline figure, the ruling hands the European Commission significant legal ammunition for future cases. The judges held that regulators need not systematically run a "counterfactual analysis" — modelling what the market would have looked like without the conduct — to establish an abuse of dominance. They endorsed the finding of a "status quo bias" that favours pre-installed apps, noting Google had not shown that user preference or the quality of its services alone explained its search engine's grip on Android devices.

The court also ruled that, given the particular characteristics of digital markets, proving an abuse does not depend on showing that only equally efficient competitors could be squeezed out — a threshold Google had argued for. And it upheld the classification of the conduct as a single, continuous infringement even after part of the original decision fell away.

Google voiced disappointment. The company said the judgment failed to recognise its "significant investment to ensure Android remains open, interoperable and free," according to AFP.

"In any event, we adapted our agreements to comply with the initial decision back in 2018, and we remain focused on continued innovation and openness for our users, partners and developers," a Google spokesperson said, as reported by Reuters.

Brussels' scorecard against Google

The Android judgment is the second of the Commission's three landmark Google cases from the 2010s to be sealed by the Court of Justice — and by far the largest. In September 2024, the same court upheld the €2.4 billion Google Shopping fine imposed in 2017 for self-preferencing in search results. Days later, however, the General Court annulled the €1.49 billion AdSense penalty, a reminder that the Commission's record in Luxembourg is strong but not unblemished.

Enforcement has not slowed. In September 2025 the Commission fined Google a further €2.95 billion in a separate case over its advertising-technology business, and the company faces continuing obligations — and formal investigations — under the Digital Markets Act, the EU's rulebook for digital "gatekeepers" that took effect in 2024.

Consumer advocates said the ruling vindicated the decade-long effort. "Today's judgment sends a very clear message: dominant companies cannot use their power to shut out competition and limit consumer choice," said Agustín Reyna, director general of the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC), which nonetheless urged regulators to act faster against entrenched platforms.

Decided on Luxembourg's doorstep

The judgment was delivered at the court's seat in Luxembourg-Kirchberg, the plateau above the capital that houses the EU's judicial machinery. It is from these gold-clad towers that the boundaries of European competition law are drawn — and Thursday's ruling redraws them firmly in the enforcers' favour. For the Commission, the confirmation of its biggest-ever single antitrust fine validates the theory, pioneered in the Google cases, that contractual defaults and pre-installation can amount to abuse in digital markets.

For Google, the financial hit was absorbed long ago — the fine was provisioned years back, and the company says its Android licensing terms were changed in 2018 to allow rival search engines and browsers a fairer shot. The lasting cost is precedential: the standards confirmed on Thursday will shape how the EU polices the next generation of platform disputes, from app stores to artificial intelligence.