EU launches anti-trust investigation on Google, Meta

By Agnes Szucs

BRUSSELS (AA) - The European Commission on Friday announced that it has started an investigation on Google and Meta, formerly Facebook, to find out if they broke EU competition rules with their online display advertising services.

The EU executive body will examine the so-called “Jedi Blue” cooperation agreement that Google and then Facebook stroke in 2018 to see if the deal sidelined Google’s competitors from the market of tech service advertisements.

“Via the so-called ‘Jedi Blue’ agreement between Google and Meta, a competing technology to Google's Open Bidding may have been targeted with the aim to weaken it and exclude it from the market for displaying ads on publisher websites and apps,” the European Commission’s Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager said in a press statement.

“If confirmed by our investigation, this would restrict and distort competition in the already concentrated ad tech market, to the detriment of rival ad serving technologies, publishers and ultimately consumers,” she added.

The European Commission also promised to “closely cooperate” with UK authorities who launched a similar investigation on Google and Meta.

Last June, the European Commission launched an investigation to determine if then Facebook had gathered data from advertisers to advertise its own competing services.

In two separate cases, the EU executive body imposed a penalty of €2.4 billion ($2.6 billion) and €4.3 billion ($4.7 billion) on Google for abusing its dominant position on the market of online searches and related Android operating systems.

Maintaining fair competition in the EU’s internal market is one of the few exclusive competencies of the EU. It allows the European Commission to decide on state aid rules and fine companies for breaching EU antitrust law.