France fines Google $166 million for anti-competitive behavior

France’s Competition Authority has fined Google 150 million euros ($166.4 million) for anti-competitive behavior, as well as having unclear advertising rules on Google Ads. 

Besides paying the fine, the FCA expects Google to clarify the rules for Google Ads, as well as the procedure for suspending accounts on the platform.

“The French Competition Authority considers that the Google Ads operating rules imposed by Google on advertisers are established and applied under non-objective, non-transparent and discriminatory conditions,” the FCA explained in a press release. 

“The opacity and lack of objectivity of these rules make it very difficult for advertisers to apply them, while Google has all the discretion to modify its interpretation of the rules in a way that is difficult to predict, and decide accordingly whether the sites comply with them or not.”

In one example, the FCA says that Google prohibits “charging of fees to users for products or services that are normally free,” but does not specify (at least not in precise terms) what normally “free means.” In FCA’s view, this makes the rules unfair for companies who want to advertise on Google’s platform, which is by far the dominant platform in the country with “probably more than 80 percent of the advertising market linked to searches.” 

Google got into this mess by banning an ad belonging to a company called Gibmedia, which owns sites with information on the weather, company data and phone books. Gibmedia deemed its ad was unjustly removed, and filed a complaint with the FCA, which kicked off the investigation leading to this fine. 

We’ve contacted Google for comment and will update this article when we hear back.

The fine follows a massive $1.7 billion fine, imposed on Google by the EU in March 2019 for abusive practices in online advertising. In July 2018, Google has also been fined $5 billion by the European Commission for abusing its dominant position in the smartphone market, and in June 2017, the company was fined $2.7 billion for abusing its dominance as a search engine.