Google in record fine for abuse of dominant position

Google has been fined a record €2.42 billion (more than twice as much as expected, and indeed twice as much as the "bung" given by the UK government to persuade the DUP to maintain it in office) for abusing its dominant position, contrary to Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. The Commission found that the search engine gave illegal prominence to Google's comparison shopping service. Unless it terminates the abuse within 90 days, the company will become liable to daily penalty payments up to 5% of the global turnover Google's parent, Alphabet.

The competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said:

Google has come up with many innovative products and services that have made a difference to our lives. That's a good thing. But Google's strategy for its comparison shopping service wasn't just about attracting customers by making its product better than those of its rivals. Instead, Google abused its market dominance as a search engine by promoting its own comparison shopping service in its search results, and demoting those of competitors.
What Google has done is illegal under EU antitrust rules. It denied other companies the chance to compete on the merits and to innovate. And most importantly, it denied European consumers a genuine choice of services and the full benefits of innovation.

The Commission keeps imposing record fines on technology companies. In 2009 it fined a record Intel €1.06 billion for paying manufacturers and a retailer to favour its products over those of AMD, surpassing the €497 million penalty imposed on Microsoft in 2004. There's a brief survey of the eight biggest fines imposed on technology companies for breaches of EU competition rules on the Computer Business review website here. And there is, I think, an outstanding investigation into another abuse by Google involving Google Play and the Google search engine being installed on smartphones. There's also the Commission's state aid case involving the Irish tax authorities and Apple. So many that commentators write about the EU being at war with Silicon Valley - which just happens to be where many of the dominant firms come from (and incidentally a long way from Redmond, WA). The fact remains, however, that there is an interesting phenomenon here as the law on abuse of dominant position (and the penalties for breaches) develops. The fact is, the technology sector offers huge scope for abuses of one sort or another.

There's too much to do to write more about the Google decision right now but I will get back to the story later. If you want to know more here is the Commission's press release. There's also an interesting Fact Sheet. And, with a hat-tip to Warwick Rothnie's IPwars.com blog, Ben Thomposon's comments on Stratechery.com are also well worth reading. I found them very eye-opening.

Remedies for infringements of Standards-Essential Patents

In a nicely-balanced judgment in Case C‑170/13, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd v ZTE Corp. and ZTE Deutschland GmbH (judgment here) (16 July) the Court of Justice held that the holder of a Standards-Essential Patent (or SEP, a term of art that is gaining currency very rapidly in this SEP-reliant age) can only have an injunction against an infringer if it has previously offered a licence on FRAND (a better-established term of art) terms. If the patentee has given an irrevocable undertaking to grant such a licence, it is not an abuse of a dominant position to seek an injunction and that would be prohibited by Article 102 TFEU, but the patentee has to get over a few hurdles before it is in the clear, to make sure that the right balance is struck between the interests of the patent owner and the would-be user.

First, the patentee has to alert the alleged infringer to the alleged infringement, and then it has to present a FRAND licensing proposal. If the alleged infringer carries on regardless, it will not be regarded (in the court's phrase) as having responded diligently to the proposal. It can only claim that there is an abuse of the patentee's dominant position if it has responded with a counter-proposal, offering FRAND terms (or, you might say, terms which are more FRAND, or FRANDER - there's a nice neoligism) of its own - because, of course, the only matter that can be in dispute is whether the purported FRAND terms qualify as such. Although that makes it sound far easier than it is: FRAND is not a binary, yes-or-no, matter - a wide range of terms might fall within the scope of what is fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory.

The court's approach, within its limits, nevertheless makes perfect sense: if your patent becomes the basis for a standard that everyone has to use, you have to accept that it is no longer a right to stop others from using it, merely a right to remuneration (which may be substantial). Everywhere in the IP field you can observe this shift from exclusive rights to a right to be paid for use: it happened in copyright even before the 1988 Act, when collective licensing suddenly took off with the creation of the CLA, and it was built into design right under Part III of the 1988 Act right from the start.

However, like all references to the Court of Justice, it leaves questions unanswered (usually because the questions weren't posed in the first place, which in turn is usually because they didn't arise in the case concerned so the referring national court had no reason to ask them). Can (as Laëtitia Bénard of Allen and Overy in Paris said to WIPR, that astonishingly inaccurate publication mis-spelling her surname) an injunction be blocked merely because the alleged infringer challenges the FRAND-ness (my word, not Ms Bénard's) of the offer? Will holding an SEP always place the patentee in a dominant position (a point made to WIPR by Axel Walz of King and Wood Mallesons, Munich)? How detailed does that "irrevocable undertaking" have to be (my own thought)? Given the growing frequency with which patents are already becoming standard-essential, which is likely to accelerate rapidly in the future, these are probably questions that we will see coming up before very long.

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