The European Advocate General endorses the fine of more than 4 billion euros imposed on Google, the largest in the EU.

European Court of Justice Advocate General Juliane Kokott on Thursday proposed to the Luxembourg-based court that it dismiss Google's appeal and uphold the fine of more than €4 billion imposed on the multinational for abusing its dominant position with Android .

The Advocate General's conclusions, which are not binding , support the arguments on which the EU General Court based its fine of €4.124 billion, EFE reports.

The case has been going on for more than ten years, as the European Commission opened the corresponding investigation in April 2015. The core of the case lies in the so-called "distribution agreements" between the US technology company and mobile device manufacturers, under which the latter had to pre-install Google Search and Chrome in order to obtain a license to operate the Play Store app store.

These clauses are closely related to other "anti-fragmentation" agreements that Google also included in its contracts, which conditioned Google Search and Play Store licenses on manufacturers refraining from selling phones equipped with unauthorized alternative versions of Android.

The third element of the case is the "revenue-sharing agreements," under which manufacturers waived the right to pre-install competing search engines on their devices in exchange for a share of Google's advertising revenue.

The European Commission concluded in the summer of 2018 that these agreements were "abusive" and therefore illegal, as they restricted competition within the single market and undermined or even eliminated other companies' ability to compete against Google.

Therefore, in July of that same year, it imposed a fine of almost 4.343 billion euros on Google for abusing its dominant position by forcing mobile device manufacturers and mobile network operators to accept anti-competitive contractual restrictions , some of which dated back to January 1, 2011.

Google challenged the Commission's decision before the General Court through an appeal that was only partially successful: the decision was declared invalid only in relation to the regulation of revenue sharing and the fine was set at €4.124 billion .

The multinational then filed an appeal with the Court of Justice of the EU.

For the Advocate General, "the assessment of the facts and evidence carried out by the General Court cannot be challenged before the Court of Justice and, moreover, the legal arguments invoked by Google are ineffective," according to a statement from the court.

Regarding the bundling of Play Store, Google Search and Chrome , the jurist considers that the General Court did not have to ask the Commission, in order to prove an abuse, to analyse what the competitive situation would have been had the conduct in question not occurred.

The General Court could simply find that users' decisions to use Google Search, Chrome and non-competing applications had been discriminatorily influenced by the "status quo bias" inherent in their pre-installation, against which competitors could do nothing .

Furthermore, it states that the General Court was not required to examine , beyond the group's ability to restrict competition, whether that conduct was capable of specifically driving out competitors as effective as Google.

The Advocate General also believes that the General Court "rightly based its argument on the premise that, despite the Commission's decision on revenue sharing being declared invalid, there remained a single and continuous infringement ."

And that, aside from this declaration of partial invalidity, "there was a global strategy aimed at anticipating the development of the Internet on mobile devices, while preserving Google's own business model, based primarily on the income obtained from the use of its general search service ."

Finally, he believes that the General Court "did not err in recalculating the fine."

Although the decisions of an Advocate General are not binding, the Court of Justice takes them into account in the vast majority of cases.