The Court of Justice of the European Union today upheld a fine of 4.125 billion euros against Google for anticompetitive practices tied to the Android operating system, dismissing the company's appeal in full and confirming the penalty originally set by the General Court in 2022. Alphabet, Google's parent company, remains jointly and severally liable for 1.52 billion euros of that total.

The judgment, delivered today in Luxembourg in Case C-738/22 P, closes the last legal avenue available to Google and Alphabet in a proceeding that began when the European Commission opened an investigation into Android in April 2015. The Second Chamber of the Court of Justice, presided by Judge Kirsty Jurimae, rejected all six grounds of appeal put forward by the two companies.

For the advertising and marketing sector, the ruling locks in a set of findings about how dominant digital platforms can structure their distribution agreements - findings that carry weight well beyond the Android case itself.

What the Commission found and what was upheld

The Commission's decision of July 18, 2018 identified four sets of contractual restrictions that it characterised as a single and continuous infringement of Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, the provision that prohibits abuse of a dominant market position.

The first two restrictions arose from the Mobile Application Distribution Agreements, known as MADAs, under which device manufacturers that wanted access to Google's Play Store were required to pre-install both the Google Search app and the Chrome browser. According to the Commission, the tying of Google Search to the Play Store ran from January 1, 2011 to the date of the 2018 decision; Chrome was added to that arrangement from August 1, 2012 onward.

The third set of restrictions came from Anti-Fragmentation Agreements, or AFAs, which prevented manufacturers from selling devices running versions of Android that Google had not approved. According to the Commission's analysis, this effectively blocked commercial markets for so-called non-compatible Android forks - alternative operating systems built on Android's open-source code but without Google's approval. Amazon's Fire OS was cited as a practical example: six major manufacturers refused to develop devices running it, citing concerns that doing so would breach their AFAs with Google.

The fourth restriction - contained in revenue share agreements, or RSAs - required manufacturers and mobile network operators to agree not to pre-install any competing general search service on a defined portfolio of devices in exchange for a percentage of Google's advertising revenue. According to the Commission, this arrangement ran from January 1, 2011 to March 31, 2014, when Google voluntarily replaced portfolio-based RSAs with device-level agreements.

The Commission calculated a fine of 4.342 billion euros. When the case reached the General Court, that court found procedural errors in the Commission's handling of the RSA element - specifically, that the Commission had substantially revised the scope of its objections in letters of facts rather than in a supplementary statement of objections, depriving Google of an oral hearing on those revised objections. The General Court annulled the RSA finding and reduced the fine to 4.125 billion euros. It left the remaining three sets of restrictions - the Google Search tie, the Chrome browser tie, and the anti-fragmentation obligations - intact.

The Court of Justice today confirmed both the General Court's approach to the three surviving infringements and its calculation of the fine. The RSA annulment was not challenged by the Commission and so was not at issue in the appeal.

The six grounds Google raised - and why all failed

Google and Alphabet structured their appeal around six grounds. Each was rejected.

Pre-installation and the status quo effect

The first two grounds concerned the MADA pre-installation conditions: whether the General Court had correctly assessed their exclusionary effects and whether it had required the Commission to demonstrate foreclosure of rivals that were at least as efficient.

Google argued that the General Court had wrongly taken the RSAs into account when assessing the MADAs, given that signatories to MADAs were not obliged to enter into RSAs. The Court of Justice rejected this. According to the judgment, a factual element may be used as relevant context for assessing the effects of particular conduct even if that element is not itself characterised as abusive. The RSAs and MADAs were complementary arrangements; their combined effects were not separable on the markets concerned. Between 2011 and 2016, more than 50 percent of Android devices sold in the European Economic Area were covered by RSAs that required Google Search to be set as the default, which meant the theoretical option for manufacturers to pre-install a rival search service alongside Google Search was in practice unavailable on at least half of all devices.

The Court also addressed what the judgment calls the status quo bias. The General Court had found that pre-installation of an app confers a measurable advantage and that competing search providers had not been able to offset it. Google argued that low download rates for rival apps reflected genuine user preference for its products. The Court of Justice held that once the Commission establishes to the required legal standard that a user's choice has been distorted by particular conduct - here, mandatory pre-installation - it is not then required to separately establish that the distortion, rather than the intrinsic quality of Google's products, explained the observed behaviour.

On the question of as-efficient competitor analysis, the Court found that it is not a universal requirement under Article 102 TFEU. In digital markets characterised by high barriers to entry, network effects, multi-sided structures, and ecosystem lock-in, conduct that does not constitute competition on the merits can make entry by an equally efficient competitor practically impossible. In those circumstances, the absence of an explicit as-efficient competitor test does not invalidate the abuse finding.

The anti-fragmentation obligations

The third and fourth grounds concerned the AFAs. Google argued that the General Court had effectively rewritten the Commission's decision - which found that the abuse lay in conditioning Play Store and Google Search licences on acceptance of the anti-fragmentation obligations - by framing the abuse as a broader "practice of preventing the development and market presence of devices running a non-compatible Android fork."

The Court of Justice rejected this reading. According to the judgment, the terminology used by the General Court differed from the text of the Commission's decision, but it did not identify abusive conduct that was substantively different. The Commission had clearly argued that the AFAs were designed to deprive non-compatible Android fork developers of commercial markets, and the General Court's analysis remained within that frame. Taking Google's refusal to license its proprietary application programming interfaces to incompatible forks into account as contextual evidence did not constitute a reformulation of the abuse.

The Court also rejected the argument that the Commission was obliged to carry out a counterfactual analysis. Such an analysis is one possible method of establishing the causal link between conduct and anticompetitive effects, but not the only one. Given that Google's own internal documents showed the anti-fragmentation obligations were knowingly designed to limit access to non-compatible Android forks, and given the established effects on manufacturers' willingness to distribute those forks, the Commission's demonstration was sufficient.

Google's objective justifications - protecting compatibility within the Android ecosystem, safeguarding reputation, and recovering investment costs from releasing Android as open-source software - were all rejected. The fourth ground of appeal, which concerned these justifications in detail, was rejected as inadmissible because Google failed to identify specific distortions of evidence by the General Court; it instead challenged factual findings that are beyond the scope of an appeal limited to points of law.

Single and continuous infringement

The fifth ground argued that once the RSA element was annulled, the General Court should have reassessed whether the remaining three restrictions still constituted a single and continuous infringement, or whether the annulment had altered the substance of that finding.

The Court held that each of the remaining restrictions had been characterised as a separate, autonomous infringement in the Commission's decision. The fact that one element of the overall scheme was removed did not undermine the finding that the others formed part of an overall strategy. That strategy consisted in attaching special conditions to the use of the Android OS and of certain apps to preserve Google's dominant position in general search services at a critical moment - the transition to mobile internet.

The fine itself

The sixth and final ground alleged that the General Court had infringed Google's rights of defence by adopting a different methodology for calculating the fine than the Commission had used, and that the fine was disproportionate.

The Commission had applied a single overall multiplier for the duration of the infringement. The General Court identified three distinct periods of variable intensity: an exploratory phase from January 2011 to August 2012; a period of peak intensity from August 2012 to March 2014, when the exclusionary effects of the MADAs, AFAs, and RSAs combined; and a third period from March 2014 to the date of the Commission's decision, during which Google had voluntarily ended portfolio-based RSAs but continued to develop proprietary APIs that reinforced the anti-fragmentation effect.

The Court of Justice confirmed that exercising unlimited jurisdiction over the fine did not require the General Court to invite parties to comment on each methodological choice in advance. The result - 4.125 billion euros, down from the Commission's original 4.342 billion euros, with Alphabet jointly liable for 1.52 billion euros - was within the 10 percent of global annual turnover ceiling set by EU competition regulation.

Why this ruling matters for search and advertising markets

The Android case runs in parallel with a dense landscape of Google antitrust proceedings covered by PPC Land. In September 2025, the Commission imposed a separate 2.95 billion euro fine on Google for abusing dominant positions in publisher ad servers and programmatic buying markets. That case is still in its early stages.

The Court of Justice upheld a 2.4 billion euro fine in September 2024 in the Google Shopping case, which concerned the promotion of Google's own comparison shopping service over rivals in organic search results. The Android ruling today follows the same institutional trajectory: Commission decision, General Court review, Court of Justice appeal, final dismissal.

The pattern matters for how enforcement agencies and courts outside the EU read these cases. In Australia, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission secured a 55 million Australian dollar penalty in December 2025 from Google over exclusive pre-installation arrangements with Telstra and Optus - practices structurally similar to the RSAs at issue in the Android case.

In the United States, Google filed an appeal in May 2026 seeking to reverse Judge Mehta's August 2024 ruling that it had illegally maintained a monopoly in general search services, partly through exclusive distribution agreements worth over 26 billion dollars in 2021 alone.

The core legal question running through all these cases - whether mandatory pre-installation, default settings, and exclusivity payments constitute abusive conduct by a dominant undertaking - has now been settled at the highest EU level in a way that is unfavourable to Google. The Court of Justice's finding that as-efficient competitor analysis is not mandatory in digital ecosystem markets, and that combined effects of complementary agreements can be assessed together even where individual agreements are not each independently unlawful, provides a template for future enforcement.

For publishers, search advertisers, and competing search providers, the ruling removes any remaining uncertainty that the pre-installation practices documented in the MADA regime were found to be anticompetitive. The remedial obligations imposed in 2018 - requiring Google to end those practices within 90 days of the Commission's decision - remain in place. The fine itself, confirmed at just over 4.1 billion euros, is now final.

Timeline

  • March 25, 2013: FairSearch files complaint with the European Commission about Google's Android business practices
  • April 15, 2015: Commission opens formal proceedings against Google in relation to Android
  • July 18, 2018: Commission adopts decision in Case AT.40099 finding a single and continuous infringement and imposing a fine of 4.342 billion euros, with Alphabet jointly liable for 1.92 billion euros
  • August 2012: Commission identifies the start of Chrome browser tying to Google Search and Play Store
  • March 31, 2014: Last portfolio-based RSA ends; Google transitions to device-based revenue share agreements
  • October 9, 2018: Google and Alphabet lodge appeal before the General Court (Case T-604/18)
  • January 28, 2025: Hearing before the Court of Justice
  • June 19, 2025: Advocate General Kokott delivers her opinion
  • September 14, 2022: General Court delivers judgment, partially annulling the RSA element and reducing the fine to 4.125 billion euros; Alphabet jointly liable for 1.52 billion euros
  • November 30, 2022: Google and Alphabet file appeal with the Court of Justice (Case C-738/22 P)
  • July 2, 2026: Court of Justice, Second Chamber, dismisses the appeal in full and orders Google and Alphabet to pay the Commission's costs

Summary

Who: Google LLC and Alphabet Inc. were the appellants; the European Commission defended the 2018 decision. The case was heard by the Second Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union.

What: The Court of Justice dismissed Google's appeal in its entirety, confirming a fine of 4.125 billion euros for anticompetitive contractual practices in the Android mobile operating system ecosystem - specifically, tying Google Search and Chrome to the Play Store and conditioning licences on anti-fragmentation obligations.

When: The Commission's original decision was issued on July 18, 2018. The General Court ruled on September 14, 2022. The Court of Justice delivered its final judgment today, July 2, 2026.

Where: The proceedings took place before EU institutions in Luxembourg and Brussels. The conduct at issue affected all national markets within the European Economic Area.

Why: The Commission found that Google used its dominant positions in the Android app store market and in general search to extend its control over mobile search and browser markets, harming competitors and consumers by entrenching Google Search as the default on the vast majority of Android devices during the critical transition to mobile internet use.