Google will pay $270M to settle antitrust charges
Google agreed to pay roughly $270 million in fines and change some of its business practices as part of a settlement announced Monday with French antitrust regulators who had accused the company of abusing its dominance of the online advertising market.
The agreement was one of the first times an antitrust regulator had taken direct aim at Google’s online advertising infrastructure, a platform that scores of websites worldwide rely on to sell ads.
The fine is a pittance compared with Google’s overall business — its parent entity, Alphabet, earned $41 billion last year — but French authorities hailed the concessions from the company because they affect technology and practices at the heart of its business.
In the United States, Google faces similar antitrust scrutiny over its online advertising technology from a group of state attorneys general, as well as from Britain’s antitrust regulator.
Bruno Le Maire, the French finance minister, heralded the agreement.
“It is essential to apply our competition rules to the digital giants who operate in our country,” he said. The accusations of abuse of the advertising technology are “serious,” he added, “and they have been rightly punished.”
French competition regulators said Google used its position as the world’s largest internet advertising company to hurt news publishers and other sellers of internet ads. Authorities said a service owned by the Silicon Valley giant and used by others to sell ads across the internet gave Google’s business an advantage, undercutting competition.
As part of the settlement, French authorities said Google agreed to end the practice of giving its services preferential treatment and to change its advertising system so that it would work more easily with other services.
Google has built up its dominance in online advertising for more than a decade, controlling technology at nearly every step of a process that underpins key parts of the internet economy. Its services help publishers sell space on their websites, and its technology runs automated auctions that let brands bid to place ads in those slots.
Google’s position has long been a source of concern among competitors and news publishers, who say it gives the company unfair insights into advertising prices, inventory and data that others cannot match.
Among the companies that complained to French authorities about Google were News Corp., publisher of The Wall Street Journal and a longtime critic of the company’s ad technology, and French publisher Rossel La Voix Group, the competition authority said.