The situation is “very unusual,” said Anne Witt, a professor in competition law at EDHEC Business School in Lille, France.
“Structural remedies are almost unprecedented at the EU level,” Witt added. “It’s really the sledgehammer.”
In its September decision, the Commission took the “unusual and unprecedented step,” per Witt, to ask Google to design its own remedy — while signaling, if cautiously, that anything short of a sale of parts of its advertising technology business would fall foul of the EU antitrust enforcer.
“It appears that the only way for Google to end its conflict of interest effectively is with a structural remedy, such as selling some part of its Adtech business,” Executive Vice President Teresa Ribera, the Commission’s competition chief, said at the time.
As the clock counts down to the deadline for Google to tell the Commission what it intends to do, the possibility of a Brussels-ordered breakup of an American tech champion is unlikely to go unnoticed in Washington, even as the Donald Trump administration pursues its own case against the search giant. (Google accounts for 90 percent of the revenues of Alphabet, the $3.3 trillion technology holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California.)
Google has said that it will appeal the Commission’s decision, which in its view requires changes that would hurt thousands of European businesses. “There’s nothing anticompetitive in providing services for ad buyers and sellers, and there are more alternatives to our services than ever before,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, its vice president and global head of regulatory affairs, wrote in a blog post in September.