On Wednesday 14 June, the European Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager, announced that the European Commission had sent a statement of objections to the American technology multinational Google. The Commission’s preliminary view is that Google has infringed European competition rules, in particular Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which prohibits the abuse of a dominant position.
The Commission’s preliminary view is that Google may have abused its dominant position in the online advertising technology sector in the European Economic Area in order to favour its own online display advertising technology services, to the detriment of its competitors.
Google may have abused its dominant position in the market for publishers’ ad servers with its ‘DoubleClick For Publishers’ (DFP) service and in the market for programmatic ad buying tools for the open web with its ‘Google Ads’ and ‘DV360’ services.
More specifically, the Commission takes the preliminary view that the company has abused its dominant position by favouring its own AdX ad exchange in auctions managed by its DFP service or by informing AdX in advance of the value of the best competing bid.
The Commission also came to the preliminary conclusion that Google would have favoured its AdX ad exchange by, for example, using its ‘Google Ads’ and ‘DV360’ ad-buying tools to place AdX offers on ad exchanges in a more visible or attractive way.
Margrethe Vestager said that Google had changed its behaviour to make it more difficult to detect whenever such practices had been detected.
If these anti-competitive practices are confirmed, the Commission considers that a corrective measure requiring Google simply to change its behaviour would not put an end to the distortions of competition. In the Commission’s view, conflicts of interest are inherent in Google’s position: not only is the multinational present on both the buy and sell sides of the online advertising technology market and holds a dominant position on both sides, but it also operates the largest ad exchange.
As a result, Ms Vestager believes that if, at the end of its investigation, the Commission confirms that Google has acted illegally, it could require the multinational to give up some of its services.
Link to case study: https://aeur.eu/f/7hk (Original version in French by Émilie Vanderhulst)