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• Britain started a second antitrust probe over Google’s ad practices
• CMA said Google may have limited compatibility of its ad exchange with third-party, weakening competition
UK’s competition regulator on Thursday launched a fresh round of investigation into the advertising practices of Alphabet Inc’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google, saying the search giant could be distorting competition and potentially may have illegally favored its own services.
It is the second major antitrust probe to target Google’s ad practices in Britain.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in March launched an investigation into Google and Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ: FB) over concerns that a 2018 deal between the two tech giants — known as “Jedi Blue” — weakened competition in the online advertising market.
The CMA said that Google acts as both a demand-side platform (DSP) that offers publishers’ ad inventory to marketers and ad exchange and also serves as an exchange for digital ads that allows real-time auctions by connecting to multiple DSPs, collecting bids from them.
The tech giant also runs ad servers which manage publishers’ inventory.
The authority expressed concerns that Google may have limited the compatibility of its ad exchange with third-party ad servers to make it harder for competing ad servers to compete.
“We’re worried that Google may be using its position in ad tech to favour its own services to the detriment of its rivals, of its customers and ultimately of consumers,” CMA’s Chief Executive Andrea Coscelli said in a statement.
“Weakening competition in this area could reduce the ad revenues of publishers, who may be forced to compromise the quality of their content to cut costs or put their content behind paywalls.”
Picture Credit: Simplilearn
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