EU Commission investigating whether Google prioritized its advertising technology
The European Commission has opened an official investigation into Google ad technology. The question here is whether Google has violated EU competition rules by favoring its own ad tech supply chain.
The study examines whether Google is giving preferential treatment to its own online display advertising technology services and whether this has been at the expense of competing ad technology service providers, advertisers and online publishers. The main focus will be on finding out whether Google distorts competition by restricting third-party access to user data for advertising purposes on websites and apps. This could be the case, for example, if Google only keeps such data for itself.
The Executive Vice-President of the European Commission, Margrethe Vestager, also responsible for the Competition portfolio, underlines that Google has a presence at almost all levels of the online display advertising chain: the company collects data for targeted advertising purposes, sells advertising space and also acts as a online advertising intermediary. “We are concerned that Google has made it more difficult for rival online advertising services to compete in the so-called ad tech stack,” Vestager said. She emphasizes that a level playing field is of great importance and makes it clear that the study also examines whether Google’s policy on user tracking is in line with fair competition.
The Commission focuses specifically on a number of elements, such as the obligation to use Google’s Display & Video 360 and/or Google Ads service to purchase image ads on YouTube. In addition, it looks at the obligation to use Google Ad Manager and whether Google’s AdX is favored by DV360 and/or Google Ads. The Commission will also investigate which restrictions have been declared applicable to third parties for taking in user data that is available via Google’s own services such as Doubleclick ID. The investigation will also focus on Google’s plan to restrict the placement of third-party cookies on Chrome and replace them with its Privacy Sandbox tools, while also examining its effects on the advertising markets.
The investigation may lead to the conclusion that the EU cartel prohibition and/or the prohibition against abusing a dominant position have been violated. There is no legal deadline for the investigation and the Commission has not yet commented on how long it will take. It seemed clear before that such an investigation was imminent; At the beginning of this year, the Commission already sent out questionnaires in which Google’s advertising technology was one of the topics.
In the past five years, the Commission has imposed several heavy fines on Google for breaching competition rules, such as 2.4 billion euros for favoring its own price comparison site Google Shopping in the search results of Google’s search engine. Google was also fined €4.34 billion for Android abuse of power and a fine of €1.49 billion for abuse of power with the search advertising service AdSense. The current investigation is the fourth major EU competition investigation in five years to target Google.