BillionDollar Blow

Google is facing yet another hefty antitrust fine in Europe.

Antitrust regulators for the European Union fined the search company 1.5 billion euros over what it found to be another set of violations to antitrust laws in the region covering online advertising practices up until 2016. Of particular issue for the European regulators is Google's AdSense program, which surfaces paid ads for products related to a person's search words, on Google's main search page, but also on other web sites, like news and blogs, making the platform a broker, too.

Margrethe Vestager, European commissioner for competition, wrote in a statement that this type of advertising “is by far Google's main source of revenue.” And its revenue is substantial, coming in at $136.2 billion in 2018, 85 percent of which came from advertising. With an already dominant market position in online advertising, the European Commission sees Google's position as a broker through AdSense as freezing out potential competitors in the space, since it holds more than 70 percent of the ad broker market in Europe and has since 2006. Vestager said Google has “abused its dominance to stop web sites using brokers other than the AdSense platform.”

“There are high barriers to entry, which make it hard for new competitors to come in,” Vestager wrote. “Despite that, competition should be possible in this market. Different web sites can choose different brokers — and the same web site could use more than one broker, to provide different ads. Indeed, our investigation showed that many web sites had an interest to use more than one broker.”

The investigation focused on how Google enacted the use of AdSense with partners, noting brokerage contracts with major web sites or “direct partners” included provisions like exclusivity, prohibiting companies from sourcing ads elsewhere; minimum buys for search ads and demands that they be given the most visibility, and control of how the ads actually looked on a site, with