On 6th September the CMA announced a Statement of Objections setting out how Google may have broken competition law by using its dominance to self preference its own adtech services in open display advertising. MOW have been working with the CMA since 2020 to help them understand and navigate the issues around Google’s attempts to dominate the open web and this process is, in part, a result of those conversations. Alongside this, MOW is the lead complainant in the EU Ad Tech case – that is nearing completion and we expect a final Decision from the Commission before the end of November. We were also the lead complainant in the CMA’s investigation into Google’s Privacy Sandbox technology, which has resulted in the delays to the roll out of that project and Google’s recent U-turn on cookie deprecation. We are also helping the US authorities in the Ad Tech case that went to trial on 10 September.
Google is now facing concurrent competition processes in the UK, US and the EU. Even if it somehow succeeds in defeating the US Department of Justice in its current AdTech trial Google will still face a day of reckoning from these other regulators. That said, this war is not won. We know that Google has used its monopoly power to reshape the web for its own benefit but the only way that this wrong can be righted is through well thought-out remedies. A breakup of Google’s display advertising businesses is necessary but not sufficient. Google’s ability to dominate the web through its control of the Chrome browser must be reined in if we are to prevent them from simply reasserting their monopoly by another channel. Looking more broadly, we must also address the very same behaviour by Apple to ensure that the open web can thrive across devices. Beyond this, we must look at how web standards are developed, agreed and enforced and we need to build a global legislative consensus on digital privacy that works for both businesses and consumers.
We have a once in a lifetime opportunity to use this moment to create a fair, competitive and privacy-friendly infrastructure for the internet for generations to come. Short term thinking is therefore not enough – we must look at what has gone wrong, fix the structural issues that have arisen and then put in place processes to ensure that they can never happen again.