The UK Competition and Markets Authority has launched a new investigation into Google’s advertising business. According to the competition watchdog, it is investigating “whether Google is restricting the ability of ad exchanges to communicate with third-party ad servers and/or combining these services to make it harder for competing ad servers to compete.”
The Verge reports that the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has launched a new investigation into Google’s advertising business amid concerns the company is acting like a monopoly and freezing competitors. This is the CMA’s second investigation into Google, after a joint EU investigation was announced in March between Google and Facebook over alleged conspiracy in the advertising industry.
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The latest research will examine Google’s “ad tech stack” of tools that make up the online ad market. The CMA said Google “has a strong position at various levels of the ad tech stack” and is exploring three key elements of which Google is its biggest competitor. The study will cover the market that companies use to advertise their ad spaces, their online ad exchanges, and the ad servers that store the ads and choose which ones to show.
The CMA is investigating whether Google is suing its dominance over these separate businesses to drive customers to its services and make it harder for other companies to compete. Some of the practices that CMA is investigating include whether “Google restricts publishers’ interaction with third-party ad servers to exchange ad exchanges and/or by contracting these services together, making it more difficult for competing ad servers to compete.”
CMA leader Andrea Coscelli said in a press release:
Weak competition in this space can reduce ad revenue for publishers, who may have to compromise on the quality of their content to cut costs or put their content behind paywalls. It can also lead to increased costs for advertisers leading to higher prices for advertised products and services.
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Source: Breitbart
