The EU’s General Court has annulled a €1.5bn penalty against Google that was targeted at its online advertising business.

The European Commission (EC) launched the action against Google in 2019 for imposing anti-competitive restrictions on third-party websites for a decade between 2006 and 2016.

The ruling applied to Google’s Adsense platform and was triggered by a complaint from Microsoft in 2010.

Regulators accused Google of inserting exclusivity clauses in its contracts that barred web businesses from running similarly placed ads sold by Google’s rivals.

At the time of issuing the penalty, the EC said that Google’s behaviour resulted in advertisers and website owners having less choice and probably facing higher prices that would be passed on to consumers.

However, when the case was in the Luxembourg-based General Court on Wednesday, the court said that while it “upheld most of the commission's assessments” it would not impose the fine as it had “failed to take into account all the relevant...