Google’s anti-competitive practices raise concern for the European Commission, which announced, on Tuesday, June 22, the opening of an investigation against the American giant in online display advertising technologies. Google is committed to cooperating constructively with the European Commission. Google promises to stop spying on users, saying 3rd-party for-profit tracking model to be phased out.
Google “is present at almost every level of the supply chain for online display advertising. We fear (that it) has made it more difficult to compete (…) for (…) competing services, “EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in a statement. It collected data used for targeted advertising, sold advertising space and acted as an online advertising intermediary.
Last year, Google earned $ 147 billion in revenue from online advertising, more than any other company in the world. Ads on its sites, including the search engine, YouTube and Gmail, accounted for the bulk of sales and profits.
About 16% of revenue came from its display or network business, where other media companies use Google technology to sell ads on their website and apps.
“Thousands of European companies use our advertising products every day to reach new customers and fund their websites. They choose them because they are competitive and efficient,” said a Google spokesperson.
This investigation by the European competition authority opens a new front against Google, which has already been sentenced to more than 8 billion euros in fines over the past decade for blocking its rivals in the field of online shopping , Android smartphones and online advertising. He was convicted of breaking antitrust rules by imposing restrictive covenants in contracts with third-party websites that prevented Google’s competitors from placing their search ads on those websites.
At the start of the year, the French competition watchdog fined Google € 220 million ($ 262 million) for abusing its market power in the online advertising industry. In March, the EC fined the company € 1.49 billion.
