Alphabet-owned Google has successfully challenged a £1.26bn (€1.49 bn) antitrust fine, received in 2019 for hindering rivals in the competitive online search advertising space.

The development comes just one week after the company lost its final fight against a £2bn (€2.4bn) fine for using its price comparison shopping service to gain an advantage over smaller European rivals.

The 2019 fine, which was triggered by a complaint from Microsoft in 2010, related to Google’s online advertising programme AdSense.

Although the court upheld most of the initial assessment, judges at the EU’s General Court annulled the fine, saying that it erroneously failed “to take into account” all the circumstances around the duration of Google’s contractual clauses with advertisers.

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“In those conditions, 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,” yesterday’s judgement read.

In a separate investigation, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) provisionally found that the tech giant is “abusing its dominant position” in the ad tech market.

In a statement of objections the CMA said Google had been operating both its publisher and buying tools in a way which uses its dominance in the open-display advertising market to favour its own ad tech services and restricts competition in the UK market.

It expressed concern that Google is “actively” using its dominance in the sector to disadvantage its competitors and “prevent them from competing on a level playing field”.