Under appealfine · Antitrust (Art. 102 TFEU)
Google fined €2.95B over ad-tech self-preferencing
€3B
≈ $3.5B at the time
European Commission
EU · 2025
Status: Under appeal
What happened
The Commission found that Google abused its dominance across the advertising-technology stack by favouring its own ad exchange (AdX) in both its publisher ad server and its ad-buying tools, a conflict of interest across the chain.
How it affected users
Publishers earned less and advertisers paid more, costs that flow through to consumers, and the open web's ad-funded model was weakened.
Status timeline
Sep 5, 2025
Penalty announced.
Sources
Last verified 2026-07-02. Spotted an error? Report a correction.
Cite this entry
Deepak Gupta, "Google fined €2.95B over ad-tech self-preferencing," Tech Fines Directory, guptadeepak.com, 2025-09-05. https://guptadeepak.com/tech-fines/violation/google-eu-adtech-2025/