Europe has accused Google of"abusive practices in online advertising technology" that could lead to its ad business being split up, the EU Commission wrote in a. It found preliminarily that since Google is unlikely to change its behavior, only the"mandatory divestment" of part of its services would address competition concerns.
"Google is present at almost all levels of the so-called adtech supply chain," executive VP Margrethe Vestager said in a statement."Our preliminary concern is that Google may have used its market position to favor its own intermediation services. Not only did this possibly harm Google’s competitors but also publishers’ interests, while also increasing advertisers’ costs."
Google's ad business is now under attack on several fronts. Earlier this year, the US Department of Justice to break up its ad business, accusing it of illegally monopolizing the market. That in turn forced key ad tech rivals to abandon the market, dissuade new ones from joining and left the few remaining competitors"marginalized and unfairly disadvantaged," the regulator said.
There is nothing wrong with being dominant as such. What our investigation has shown though, is that Google appears to have abused its market position. It did so by ensuring that both its intermediation tools on the buy- side and on the sell-side would favour AdX in the “matching” auctions. The EU Commission said Google is dominant in virtually all parts of adtech via services for both advertisers and publishers, along with an ad exchange called AdX. That would be fine by itself, but it accused Google of abusing its market position by making sure both its buy- and sell-side intermediation tools would favor its own exchange."In other words, we are concerned about two potentially anticompetitive conducts by Google, which are both about favoring AdX," the Commission wrote.
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