Just what is the EU’s beef with Google?

Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s Danish competition commissioner, has slapped her organization’s third major fine on Google: in June 2017 it was €2.4 billion for biasing its search results to the detriment of its competitors; in July 2018 the EU handed down a €4.3 billion sanction for the way it put search and web-browser apps onto Android mobile devices, and now it has been ordered to pay €1.5 billion for restricting the advertising of competitors on pages using AdSense, for which it demanded exclusivity, later reserving the best positions for Google. In total, the bill now amounts to €8.2 billion in less than two years.

Is this third European Commission fine justified? The short answer is “yes”, and the long one is “yes of course”. Google has done everything the European Commission accuses it of, and has done so for the reasons it is accused of. Let’s be honest: few page managers would included another company’s advertisements unless forced to: Google not only dominates the market, but its product is, in general, superior. The company opted for an aggressive and restrictive strategy when its market position did not require it to do so, turning itself into a veritable bull in a china shop. The fine is simply an imperfect way to make Google pay for some broken tableware, and it is not bigger because the company, aware of this, withdrew several of the aforementioned limitations in…