European Commission: Google Must Divest Part of Its Display-Ads Business
Yet another government has concluded that Google cannot be trusted with the display-ads market in its current form.
The European Commission announced a preliminary “Statement of Objections” on Wednesday(Opens in a new window) in which it concluded that Google had abused its dominance of the buy and sell sides of programmatic display advertising to force publishers and advertisers to do business through Google’s own exchange—and that only forcing Google to divest some of those business units will end that abuse.
Specifically, the commission found that for at least the last nine years, Google exploited its dominance of the sell-side publisher ad server market, where third-party sites sell ad spots on their pages, to favor its own AdX exchange over competitors. It further found that on the buy side, where Google places bids from advertisers, Google mostly limited those bids to AdX. Both moves allowed Google to keep more money than it would have in a properly functioning market.
The commission rejected any sort of behavioral remedy because Google is too big not to fail again.
“This leads to a situation of inherent conflicts of interest for Google,” the finding says of Google dominating the sell and buy sides while also running the largest ad exchange. “The Commission's preliminary view is therefore that only the mandatory divestment by Google of part of its services would address its competition concerns.”
In a statement also posted Wednesday, European Commission EVP Margrethe Vestager supported those points. “We see the risk that Google's conduct distorted competition among ad exchanges: rather than letting the best of the ad exchanges win the race, the helping hand of the powerful Google ecosystem gave Google's own
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