Google fined €150m by French authorities over anti-competitive abuse of search ads

Google hit with third-highest antitrust fine by French authorities

Google has been fined €150 million by France's competition authorities over mistreatment of advertisers using the company's AdWords service. It claimed that the company had acted in a seemingly arbitrary manner by randomly suspending advertisers, causes losses to the businesses due to Google's market dominance.

The company was also ordered to "clarify the rules of its Google Ads advertising platform and the procedures" for suspending accounts.

We don't contest Google's right to impose rules. But the rules must be clear and imposed equally to all advertisers

Isabelle de Silva, chairman of France's competition authority, described the account suspensions as "brutal and unjustified". She continued: "We don't contest Google's right to impose rules. But the rules must be clear and imposed equally to all advertisers."

She added that because the company enjoyed such a dominant market share - more than 90 per cent - of the online search-based advertising market that it had an equally great responsibility to act fairly and impose its rules in a consistent and transparent manner.

The company has been given two months to improve its practices and processes.

The latest fine follows on from a €1 billion fine in September over a fiscal fraud probe, while in January France's data protection authority, CNIL, levied a €50 million fine over alleged breaches of GDPR.

The company has also faced a series of fines imposed by the European Union - to such an extent that in its 2018 financial year it paid out more money in fines than it did in taxes.