Turkish watchdog fines Google again for abusing its dominant position

Our latest article “Turkish watchdog fines Google again for abusing its dominant position” by Togan Turan and Gülçin Dere is published on Lexology.

Turkish Competition Board (“TCB”) recently announced its final decision regarding the investigation against Google and accordingly, the TCB unanimously decided that Google abused its dominant position in the market for general search services by means of complicating organic search results in the content services market1 . The investigation was initiated to determine whether Google infringed competition law with Google’s updates on general search services and AdWords by obstructing the activities of the advertisers operating in the content services market.

After a depth-investigation, the TCB concluded that Google has violated Article 6 of Law No. 4054 on the Protection of Competition (the “Law No. 4054”) by placing text ads at the top of the general search results with an uncertain and intensive advertising quality by making it difficult to operate in the content services market of organic results that do not generate advertising revenue. In accordance with the Article 16 of the Law no. 4054, it was decided to impose an administrative fine on Google amount to 196.708.054,78 TRY, which roughly equals to 22 million Euros.

Apart from the fine, the TCB mandated Google to fulfil its requirements and end its anti-competitive advertisement strategy in six months. These adaptation measures must be presented to the TCB until a month before the deadline. Google will also have to deliver annual reports to the TCB about the advertisement strategy of its search engine for five years.

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