Google’s Display Advertising Business Is Under Antitrust Probe In Italy

Italy’s competition authority has opened an antitrust investigation into Google’s display ad business — adding another allegation of abuse of a dominant position to the tech giant’s regulatory woes. In a press release announcing the action the AGCM said it “questions the discriminatory use of the huge amount of data collected through its various applications, preventing rivals from competing effectively as well as adversely affecting consumers”. The probe follows a complaint by local ad lobby group the IAB Italy, per Reuters, which says the investigation must be concluded by November 2021. Specifically, the AGCM said it suspects Google of what it refers to as “internal/external discriminatory conduct” — by refusing to provide competitors with Google ID decryption keys and excluding third-party tracking pixels. “At the same time, Google has allegedly used tracking elements enabling its advertising intermediation services to achieve a targeting capability that some equally efficient competitors are unable to replicate,” it adds. We’ve reached out to Google for comment on the allegations. The move comes as Google is being sued on home turf by the US Department of Justice (DoJ), which filed an antitrust case earlier this month — following a 16 month investigation — alleging Google is “unlawfully maintaining monopolies in the markets for general search services, search advertising, and general search text advertising in the United States.” The Italian case also looks interesting as Google has been seeking to reframe the debate around online ad targeting vs privacy — announcing an initiative called Privacy Sandbox last year. Its aim is to evolve open web standards towards a middle ground between Internet users’ privacy and content providers’ hunger for information to target visitors with ads (as well as, of course, its own people-profiling monetization model as an adtech giant) — proposing a technique called federated learning of cohorts (FloC) which it bills as a “privacy-preserving” mechanism to enable ad targeting without individual tracking. Google proposes new privacy and anti-fingerprinting controls for the web But as part of that standards push, this January Google announced it was dialling up a plan to phase out support for third party tracking cookies — saying it now wanted to do so within the next two years.