The entrance to Google’s UK offices in London.
Olly Curtis | Future Publishing | via Getty Images
LONDON — Britain’s competition watchdog on Friday issued a statement of objections to Google’s ad technology practices, which the regulator provisionally found to be affecting competition in the United Kingdom
In a statement, the Competition and Markets Authority claimed that the US online search titan “has harmed competition by using its dominance of online display advertising to favor its own ad technology services”.
The “vast majority” of the UK’s thousands of publishers and advertisers use Google’s technology to bid and sell ad space in a market where players spent £1.8 billion a year as of a 2019 study, according to the CMA.
The regulator added that it is “also concerned that Google is actively using its dominance in this area to favor its own services.” The so-called “self-preferring” of services by tech giants is a key concern for regulators who oversee these companies.
The CMA further noted that Google is putting ad tech competitors at a disadvantage by preventing them from competing on a “level playing field”.
“Many businesses are able to keep their digital content free or cheaper by using online advertising to generate revenue. Ads on these websites and apps reach millions of people across the UK — helping them buy and sell goods and services Juliette Enser, the CMA’s interim executive director of enforcement, said in a statement on Friday.
“That’s why it’s so important that publishers and advertisers – who enable this free content – can benefit from effective competition and get a fair deal when buying or selling digital advertising space,” added Enser.
Dan Taylor, Google’s vice president of Google Ads, said the company disagreed with the CMA’s view and “will respond accordingly.”
“Our ad technology tools help websites and apps monetize their content and enable businesses of all sizes to effectively reach new customers,” Taylor said in an emailed statement.
“Google remains committed to creating value for our publishers and advertising partners in this highly competitive space. The core of this case is based on misinterpretations of the ad tech space.”
It’s not the first time the US tech giant has been said to be abusing its dominant position in ad tech to hurt competition. Within the European Union, regulators last year accused Google of violating antitrust rules in the ad tech sector and said they may seek to break up parts of the tech giant’s business to assuage their concerns.
Stateside, a federal judge in August sided with the Justice Department on claims that Google has had a monopoly on search and text advertising for years.
That ruling — the first antitrust ruling against a tech company in decades — was compared to an antitrust filing against Microsoft, which determined that the company had unlawfully used the market power of its Windows operating system to eliminate competition from competing browsers, specifically Netscape. Pilot.
In the CMA’s ruling on Friday, the watchdog said that, since 2015, Google has abused its dominant position as the operator of both the ad buying tools “Google Ads” and “DV360” and a publisher ad server known as “DoubleClick For Publishers,” in order to strengthen the market position of its ad exchange, AdX.
Ad exchanges are technology platforms that facilitate the buying and selling of advertising media inventory. They work by requesting bids from publishers offering space to sell ads and then matching them with responsive bids from advertisers through an auction process.
AdX, in which Google charges the highest fees to advertisers, is the “hub of advertising technology” for the company, according to the CMA, with Google taking around 20% of the amount for each offer processed on its platform .
