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This is the just latest in a string of legal challenges the Alphabet-owned company is facing for its adtech dominance.
Canada’s Competition Bureau is taking legal action against Google for alleged anticompetitive conduct in its online adtech services in the country.
Following an investigation, the Bureau announced yesterday (28 November) that it has filed an application with the Competition Tribunal which “seeks to remedy the conduct for the benefit of Canadians”.
“The Competition Bureau conducted an extensive investigation that found that Google has abused its dominant position in online advertising in Canada by engaging in conduct that locks market participants into using its own adtech tools, excluding competitors and distorting the competitive process,” said Matthew Boswell, Canadian commissioner of competition.
Boswell alleged that Google’s conduct has prevented rivals from “being able to compete on the merits of what they have to offer, to the detriment of Canadian advertisers, publishers and consumers”.
Canada opened an investigation in 2020 to examine whether the search giant leverages its market power in the supply of video advertising into the market for advertiser buying tools. In 2021, it obtained a court order to advance the investigation. Earlier this year, it expanded the scope of the investigation to examine whether Google leverages its market power across display adtech services in a way that harms competition and whether it uses predatory pricing in certain of these services.
In its latest filing, the Bureau alleged that Google has unlawfully tied its various adtech tools together to maintain its market dominance and leveraged its position across these adtech tools to distort auction dynamics. It did this, the Bureau claimed, by giving its own tools preferential access to ad inventory, by taking negative margins in certain circumstances to disadvantage rivals, and by dictating the terms on which its own publisher customers could transact with rival adtech tools.
As a remedy, the Bureau wants Google to sell two of its adtech tools, pay a penalty and be prohibited from continuing to engage in anticompetitive practices.
The development is the latest in a series of legal woes currently faced by Google for its adtech practices.
In September, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) provisionally found that Google’s actions as a dominant player in adtech is harming advertisers and publishers and may have broken competition law. This comes as a result of the CMA’s investigation into Google’s adtech practices opened in 2022.
Last year, the EU opened an investigation into Google and alleged the tech giant breached EU antitrust laws over its attempts to influence its market position in the adtech sector. This is not the first time the EU has marked Google’s card over adtech – in 2019 it fined Google €1.49bn for abusing its market position.
While in the US, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is pushing for the software giant to divest from its Chrome and Android businesses in order to remedy its illegal monopoly over internet search.
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