The commission’s preliminary finding: Only ‚mandatory divestment‘ by Google of part of its display-ads business will end its market abuse.
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 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.
