EU INVESTIGATES GOOGLE'S CONDUCT IN DIGITAL AD TECH SECTOR

European Union regulators have launched a fresh antitrust investigation of Google, this time over whether the U.S. tech giant is stifling competition in digital advertising technology.

The European Commission said this week that it has opened a formal investigation into whether Google violated the bloc’s competition rules by favoring its own online display advertising technology services at the expense of rival publishers, advertisers and advertising technology services.

The investigation underscores European concerns about Google’s dominance in the online advertising industry and whether it’s exploiting its data advantage to cement its position in the display ad market, which the EU Commission estimates is worth 20 billion euros ($24 billion) annually. This month, France’s antitrust authority fined Google more than 220 million euros for abusing its dominance in online ads while in the U.K. it gave the competition watchdog a role overseeing its retirement of ad tracking “cookies” from the Chrome browser to resolve an investigation.

Online display ads are the banners and text that show up on websites such as newspaper home pages and are personalized based on an internet user’s browsing history. Search ads, in contrast, appear alongside search engine results and are based on keywords that users are looking for.

The commission, the EU’s executive arm and the bloc’s top antitrust enforcer, signaled it’s looking in particular at YouTube and whether Google is using the video-sharing site’s dominant position to favor its own ad-buying services by imposing restrictions on rivals.