The Canadian Competition Bureau is suing Alphabet’s Google for anti-competitive behavior in online advertising, the antitrust watchdog said Thursday.
The Competition Bureau said in a statement that it had filed an application to the Competition Court for an order, among other things, to require Google to sell its two of its advertising technology tools. It is also seeking Google’s penalties to promote compliance with Canadian competition law, the statement said.
The complaint “ignores widespread competition, with ad buyers and sellers having many options and we look forward to filing a lawsuit in court.”
“Our advertising technology tools help websites and apps fund their content and enable businesses of all sizes to effectively attract new customers,” Google said in a statement.
The Contest began a survey in 2020 to investigate whether search engine giants are engaged in practices that undermine competition in the online advertising industry and expanded the survey to include Google’s advertising technology services earlier this year.
The survey found that Google, the largest provider of Canadian advertising technology stack, “abuses its dominance through behavior, aiming to ensure it will maintain and consolidate its market power.”
The case follows the U.S. Department of Justice’s efforts to showcase Google’s monopoly market to publisher advertising servers and advertiser advertising networks.
Google believes that the U.S. Department of Justice ignores the company’s legal business decisions and the online advertising market is strong. The company also said the U.S. government has selected narrow segments of the online market and has not considered radical competition.
The ending argument in the U.S. case was put forward on Monday.
Reuters first reported in September that Google proposed to sell ads to end the EU antitrust investigation, but European publishers rejected the proposal, which was insufficient.
©Thomson Reuters 2024
(This story has not been edited by Tech Word News’s staff and is automatically generated from the joint feed.)
