The U.K.’s competition regulator has opened a fresh investigation into Google, taking aim at the company’s role in the advertising technology market.
It’s the second major antitrust probe to target Google’s ad practices in the U.K. The Competition and Markets Authority launched a separate investigation with the European Union into Google and Facebook parent company Meta earlier this year over concerns that a 2018 pact between the two companies — known as “Jedi Blue” — restricted competition in digital advertising.
Google acts as both a demand-side platform, which offers publishers’ ad inventory to marketers, and an ad exchange, which lets advertisers compete for advertising space on publishers’ websites, the CMA said. It also runs ad servers which manage publishers’ inventory.
Regulators are concerned Google may have illegally favored its own ad exchange services to the detriment of rivals. The CMA is also worried Google limited the compatibility of its ad exchange with third-party ad servers to make it harder for competing ad servers to compete.
