The European Union's highest court is preparing to rule on Thursday on whether to uphold a record fine of 4.1 billion euros (about $4.7 billion) imposed on Google for practices deemed anti-competitive by European authorities linked to the Android operating system.
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The appeal marks the second attempt by the U.S. company to overturn the European Commission's 2018 penalty, which remains the largest monopoly fine in EU history.
The European Commission, as the bloc's competition enforcer, has accused Google of abusing Android's widespread dominance to restrict competition in the smartphone market.
It said the company forced Android phone manufacturers to pre-install Google search engine and Google Chrome on their devices, giving its services an advantage over competitors, and fined it 4.3 billion euros.
In 2022, the EU's General Court, the bloc's second-highest court, upheld the Commission's decision, but reduced the fine to €4.1 billion, while retaining the substance of the charges.
Google appealed back to the European Court of Justice, the EU's highest judicial authority, arguing that the case lacked a legal basis and that the penalty penalized innovation rather than protecting competition.
The lawsuit confirms that Google exploited the power of Android, which still runs on about 70 percent of mobile devices around the world, to boost the reach of its services.
During previous litigation stages, the company argued that the European Union ignored similar practices by Apple, which gives preference to its own services, such as the Safari browser on iPhones.
Google also confirmed that Android users were not forced to use its services, as they could easily download competing apps through the App Store.
But the company received a legal setback in June 2025, when the European Court of Justice's legal counsel recommended that the fine be maintained, calling Google's rebuttals "ineffective."
Although the opinions of legal advisers are not binding on the court, they are often taken into account in rendering final judgements.
The case is one in a series of legal disputes between Google and the European Union, which between 2017 and 2019 fined the company a total of €8.2 billion for violations of competition rules.
Since then, the EU has strengthened its powers by passing the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which imposes clear rules on big tech companies outlining what they can and cannot do, rather than waiting for years for monopoly investigations to end.
Google is currently under several formal investigations under the law, and the European Union imposed an additional fine of €2.95 billion last September in a separate case involving the preference of its advertising services over competitors, a case that dates back to a period before the Digital Markets Act came into force.
This has drawn sharp criticism from U.S. President Donald Trump, who has accused Brussels of unfairly targeting U.S. companies and has repeatedly threatened retaliatory tariffs on EU exports.
