GOOGLE APPEALS $5 BILLION PENALTY

GOOGLE on Tuesday appealed the biggest ever antitrust fine by the EU, which imposed a 4.34 billion euro [$5 billion] penalty on the US tech giant for illegally abusing the dominance of its operating system for mobile devices.

In an email to AFP, Google spokesman AI Verney confirmed that ''we have now filed our appeal of  European Commission's Android decision at the General Court of the European Union.''

In its July decision, Brussels accused Google of using the Android system's huge popularity on  smartphones and tablets  to promote the use of its own Google search engine and shut out rivals.

EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vastager ordered Google to ''put an effective end to this conduct within 90 days or face penalty payments'' of up to 5% of its average daily turnover.

The sanctions nearly doubled the previous record  EU antitrust fine of 2.4 billion euros, which also targeted Google, in that case for the Silicon Valley titan's shopping comparison service in 2017.

Google provides Android free to smartphone manufacturers and generates most of its revenue from selling advertisements that appear along with search results.

But Vestager said  Google  had shut out rivals by forcing major phone makers including South Korea's  Samsung and China's Huawei to pre-install its search engine and Google Chrome browser.

They were also made to set Google search as the default, as a condition of licensing some Google apps.

As a result, Google Search and Chrome are pre-installed on the ''significant majority'' of devices   sold in the EU, the European Commission says. [AFP]