A recent settlement in a California court by Google in a case about its Real Time Bidding (RTB) practices has handed the monopolist a huge victory in its fight to crush competition in digital advertising. Whilst the settlement is being portrayed by some as a defeat for Google or a victory for privacy, the company has in fact played the courts and won to achieve a key anticompetitive goal.
The case hinged on an original complaint that Google’s digital ad system violated online user’s privacy. To settle the claim, Google offered to create an “RTB Control’ opt-in that allows users to limit the information communicated within RTB auctions Google manages on behalf of rival publishers. The court has now accepted this offer but seems to have missed the nuances of this solution.
In its settlement, Google successfully managed to focus discussion on the ‘sharing’ of any data with outside companies via the RTB protocol, overlooking the fact of its ‘use’ of these concerned consumers’ personal data. This means that Google can continue to use its own, massive logged in data assets for improving monetization of its own digital properties whilst RTB Control will strip out the necessary match keys rivals rely upon, preventing them from maximising the monetisation of their competing digital properties.
The settlement effectively delivers Google’s Privacy Sandbox goals. That project, which was halted by the CMA on competition grounds, looked to remove non-Google players’ access to advertising data, replacing it with Google’s own business-facing solutions. By removing anonymised match keys from all competitors, whilst allowing Google to continue to use its own directly identifiable match keys, this judgement will bring to life the most anticompetitive aspects of an initiative that was blocked on competition grounds.
Indeed, the settlement offered by Google seems to be in direct contradiction to the promises it made to the CMA to end early that regulator’s scrutiny of its Sandbox initiative. At the time, Google promised the CMA that it had no plans to impose restrictions on rivals’ ability to communicate in real time, leading to the CMA ending its oversight. Yet the day prior to this promise, Google made the RTB Control offer to the California court in direct opposition to this claim.
The bottom line of this judgement is that, whilst rivals lose their ability to match information using the open standard protocols of RTB, Google will continue to leverage its own data to increase the CPMs it charges across YouTube and search which remain unaffected by this new “control.” The RTB Control settlement might be presented as user empowerment but it will serve only to improve Google’s bottom line.
Background photo by Hardik Pandya on Unsplash