(Brussels) “The European Commission has fined Google to pay 4.34 billion euros for breaching EU antitrust rules. Since 2011, Google has imposed illegal restrictions on manufacturers of Android devices and mobile network operators to strengthen its dominant position in the area of general online searches”. This has been written by the European Commission in an official notice issued earlier today. Google will have 90 days to “actually put an end to such conduct”, otherwise it will be fined to pay up to 5% of the global daily turnover of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. In giving the news at a press conference, the Antitrust Commissioner, Margarethe Vestager, stated that “the mobile Internet, which now accounts for over one half of worldwide Internet traffic, has changed the life of millions of Europeans”, but “Google has imposed three restrictions on manufacturers of Android devices and mobile network operators, to have the traffic going through such devices addressed to Google’s search engine”. Android has become “a tool to strengthen the dominant position of its search engine” and has denied “competitors the chance to innovate and compete on the basis of their strengths” and to European consumers “the benefits of an actual competition in the important area of mobile devices”.