Last Update: June 15, 2023, 03:24 AM IST
United States of America, USA)
Google can now defend itself before the European Commission issues its final decision.
The stakes are high for Google in this latest struggle with regulators as it deals with the company’s biggest money maker
Alphabet’s Google may have to sell part of its lucrative edtech business to address concerns about anti-competitive practices, European Union regulators said Wednesday, threatening the company with its harshest regulatory penalties to date. .
Google set out its charges in a statement of objections two years after the European Commission launched an investigation into practices such as favoring its own advertising services, which could have led to fines of up to 10% of Google’s annual global turnover.
The stakes are high for Google in this latest struggle with regulators because it concerns the company’s biggest money maker, with the advertising business accounting for 79% of total revenue last year.
Its 2022 advertising revenue, which includes search services, Gmail, Google Play, Google Maps, YouTube ads, Google Ad Manager, AdMob and AdSense, was projected to amount to $224.5 billion.
Google has a few months to respond to the charges. It could also ask for a closed hearing before the Commission’s senior antitrust officials and their national counterparts before the EU issues a decision in a process that could take a year or more. The company could also potentially negotiate a settlement by offering stronger measures than previously proposed.
EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said Google may have to sell part of its edtech business as a practical measure to stop anti-competitive practices is unlikely to be effective.
“For example, Google could split its sell-side tools, DFP and AdX. By doing so, we would eliminate the conflict of interest,” she told a news conference.
“Of course I know that is a strong statement but it is a reflection of the nature of the markets, how they function and also why a behavioral commitment seems out of the question.”
Google said it disagrees with the commission’s allegation.
“The Commission’s investigation focused on a narrow aspect of our advertising business and is nothing new. We disagree with the EC’s approach,” Dan Taylor, Google’s vice president of global ads, said in a statement.
Vestager said Google will continue to investigate Google’s introduction of a privacy sandbox set of tools to block third-party cookies on its Chrome browser and its plans to prevent third parties from providing advertising identifiers on Android smartphones.
She said the EU has cooperated closely with competition authorities in the United States and Britain.
The European Publishers Council, which lodged a complaint with the Commission last year, welcomed the allegation.
The Commission said that Google favors its own online display advertising technology services to the detriment of competing providers of advertising technology services, advertisers and online publishers.
It said Google has supported AdX since 2014 by supporting its own ad exchange AdX in ad selection auctions by its flagship publisher ad server DFP and by bidding on the ad exchanges of its ad buying tools Google Ads and DV360. abused his authority. ,
According to research firm Insider Intelligence, Google is the world’s leading digital advertising platform with a 28% market share of global advertising revenue.
Google had sought to settle the case three months after the investigation began, but regulators were frustrated by the slow pace and lack of substantial concessions, a person familiar with the matter previously told Reuters.
(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed – reuters,
