FILE - The Google logo at their offices in Granary Square, in London, on Nov. 1, 2018. LONDON — Google was slammed Friday by U.K. regulators who say it’s taking advantage of its dominance in digital advertising to thwart competition in Britain,Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority said that the U.S. company gives preference to its own services to the detriment of online publishers and advertisers in Britain’s 1.8 billion pound digital ad market.
“We’ve provisionally found that Google is using its market power to hinder competition when it comes to the ads people see on websites,” the watchdog’s interim executive director of enforcement, Juliette Enser, said in a press release. The U.K. watchdog alleged Google has been exploiting its dominance since 2015 to strengthen the market position of its own AdX ad exchange and protect it from rivals. AdX is where Google charges the highest fees in the ad tech system, taking about 20% of the amount from bids, the CMA said.