Europe's Top Court Adviser Says the General Court Got the Google AdSense Case Wrong

Advocate General Juliane Kokott delivered her opinion in Case C-826/24 P on 12 November, and it went against Google. The question before the Court of Justice was whether the General Court was right, in 2024, to annul the European Commission's €1.49 billion decision on Google's advertising intermediation practices. Kokott's view is that it was not: she faults the General Court's reasoning and proposes that its judgment be set aside.

Advocate general opinions are advisory. The Court of Justice is not bound by them, though it follows them in the substantial majority of cases. A final judgment is not expected before 2027. The €1.49 billion remains unpaid, and nothing about Google's obligations changed this week.

What the case is about

The Commission's 2019 decision concerned AdSense for Search, the product that lets publishers run Google's search advertising on their own sites. The finding was that Google had imposed restrictive clauses in its contracts: exclusivity requirements that stopped publishers from taking rival search ads, and clauses that forced them to take a minimum number of Google ads and to seek approval before placing competitors' ads. The Commission treated those clauses as an abuse of dominance and fined Google €1.49 billion, then the third-largest antitrust penalty it had imposed on the company.

In 2024 the General Court annulled the decision in full. Its central objection was that the Commission had not adequately demonstrated the exclusionary effects of the clauses, and had failed to engage with arguments and evidence that cut the other way, including the small share of the market affected and Google's own conduct during the period.

Why the opinion matters beyond Google

That reasoning was consequential because it was general. If the Commission has to prove exclusionary effects to a forensic standard in every dominance case, a large part of its competition enforcement becomes slower, more document-heavy and easier to litigate. Kokott's opinion pushes back on that reading and defends a broader margin for the Commission's assessment.

The timing matters as much as the substance. The Commission is currently running Digital Markets Act enforcement against the same company, and DMA compliance is judged against a different legal test: whether a gatekeeper's measures are effective, not whether a specific clause produced a measurable foreclosure effect. A Court of Justice judgment restoring the AdSense reasoning would not decide those cases, but it would strengthen the Commission's hand in arguing that its factual assessments deserve deference.

Google's record in Luxembourg is mixed and worth keeping straight. It lost its final appeal against the €4.1 billion Android decision in July. It won the AdSense annulment in 2024. It lost the €2.4 billion Shopping case at the General Court and again on appeal. The company's litigation strategy has been to fight every case to the end and to accept the losses slowly, and that strategy has produced three confirmations and one annulment so far.

What happens next

The Court of Justice will now deliberate. Two outcomes are live: it sets aside the General Court's judgment and either restores the Commission's decision or sends the case back for reconsideration with corrected legal reasoning. In either scenario the Commission recovers much of what it lost in 2024, and the fine becomes collectable again.

The wider consequence is doctrinal rather than financial. €1.49 billion is a rounding error in Google's accounts. The standard of proof the Commission must meet in abuse-of-dominance cases is not, and that is what this opinion is really about.