Google suffered a legal blow at the European Court of Justice on Thursday when the body's counsel recommended upholding a record fine imposed on the company for anti-competitive practices.

The US tech giant is seeking to appeal a €4.3 billion fine imposed by the European Commission in 2018, which was later reduced to €4.1 billion.

However, in her opinion, Juliane Cocotte, advocate general at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), said that "the legal arguments presented by Google are ineffective", AFP reported.

Although not binding, such an opinion carries weight and is often followed by EU judges in their rulings.

The Commission, the EU's antitrust regulator, has accused Google of abusing the popularity of its Android operating system to limit competition.

It alleges that Google has pressured Android phone makers to pre-install its search engine and browser Google Chrome, thereby shutting out competitors. 

The findings were upheld in 2022 by the EU's second highest court, which slightly reduced the fine.

The fine remains the largest ever imposed by the EU.

Arguing that the Commission's case was unfounded and that the penalty penalised innovation, Google appealed to the EU's highest court.

The company also argued that the EU had been unfair to Apple, which gives preference to its own services, such as Safari on the iPhone.

The recommendation will serve as a guideline for the CJEU's decision. The court has the final say on the matter.

"Google occupied a dominant position in several markets of the Android-ecosystem and thus benefited from network effects that allowed it to ensure that users used Google Search," the court said, detailing Kokot's opinion. 

"As a result, Google gained access to data that allowed it to improve its services. No hypothetical competitor with equal efficiency could have found itself in such a situation," the statement said.

As part of a sweeping campaign against abuses by big tech companies, the EU fined Google a total of €8.2 billion between 2017 and 2019 for antitrust violations.

This kicked off a long series of litigations.

Brussels has since armed itself with a more powerful legal weapon known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA) to curb the tech giants' influence.

Rather than regulators finding blatant antitrust violations after years of investigations, the DMA provides businesses with a list of what they can and cannot do online. 

In March, the Commission informed Alphabet, Google's parent company, that preliminary checks had found that the search engine and the Google Play app store operated in a way that violated the new rules. | BGNES