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The suggestion that consumers have been harmed by the Google conducts at issue is strongly rejected,
Google's lawyer Meredith Pickford said in court documents The General Court annuls the (European) Commission's decision in its entirety,
the Luxembourg-based court said in a statement, We are pleased that the court has recognized errors in the original decision and annulled the fine,
a Google spokesperson added This case is about a very narrow subset of text-only search ads placed on a limited number of publishers' websites. We made changes to our contracts in 2016 to remove the relevant provisions, even before the Commission's decision. We are pleased that the court has recognized errors in the original decision and annulled the fine. We will review the full decision closely."
In a statement to Newsweek, a Google spokesperson said The General Court holds that the Commission has also not demonstrated that the clauses in question had, first, possibly deterred innovation, next, helped Google to maintain and strengthen its dominant position on the national markets for online search advertising at issue and, last, that they had possibly harmed consumers,
the tribunal said in a press release The court (...) upheld most of the commission's assessments, but annulled the decision imposing a fine of almost 1.5 billion euros on Google, on the grounds in particular that it had failed to take in account all the relevant circumstances in its assessment of the duration of the contractual clauses that it had found to be unfair,
the Luxembourg-based General Court said