Canada’s Antitrust Watchdog is suing Google for alleged anti-competitive advertising
Canada’s Competition Bureau is suing Alphabet’s Google for alleged anticompetitive behavior in online advertising, the antitrust watchdog said Thursday.
The Competition Bureau said in a statement that it had filed an application with the Competition Tribunal seeking an order that, among other things, requires Google to sell two of its advertising technology tools. The company is also seeking a fine from Google to promote compliance with Canadian competition laws, the statement said.
Google said the complaint “ignores the fierce competition where ad buyers and sellers have many choices and we look forward to arguing our case in court.”
“Our ad tech tools help websites and apps fund their content and enable businesses of all sizes to effectively reach new customers,” Dan Taylor, VP of Global Ads at Google, said in a statement.
The Competition Bureau opened an investigation in 2020 to investigate whether the search engine giant had engaged in practices that harmed competition in the online advertising industry, and expanded the probe to Google’s ad technology services earlier this year.
The investigation found that Google is the largest provider of web advertising technology in Canada and that it “has abused its dominant position through conduct designed to ensure that it maintains and consolidates its market power,” the agency said Thursday.
The case follows efforts by the US Department of Justice to demonstrate that Google has monopolized markets for publishers’ ad servers and advertisers’ ad networks.
Google has argued that the U.S. Department of Justice is ignoring the company’s legitimate business decisions and that the online advertising market is robust. The company also says the U.S. government has singled out a small portion of the online market and failed to consider aggressive competition.
The closing arguments in the American case were held on Monday.
Earlier this year, Google offered to sell the Ad Exchange to end an EU antitrust investigation, but European publishers rejected the proposal as insufficient, Reuters first reported in September.
© Thomson Reuters 2024
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