Canada’s antitrust watchdog sues Google alleging anti-competitive behavior in promoting Via Reuters

OTTAWA (Reuters) -Canada’s Festival Bureau is suing Alphabet (NASDAQ:)’s Google over alleged anti-competitive behavior in web advertising, the antitrust watchdog stated on Thursday.

The Festival Bureau, in a observation, stated it had filed an software with the Festival Tribunal in the hunt for an order that, amongst different issues, calls for Google to promote two of its advert tech gear. It’s also in the hunt for a penalty from Google to advertise compliance with Canada’s pageant regulations, the observation stated.

Google stated the grievance “ignores the serious pageant the place advert patrons and dealers have a number of selection and we sit up for making our case in courtroom.”

“Our promoting generation gear lend a hand web pages and apps fund their content material, and allow companies of all sizes to successfully achieve new shoppers,” Dan Taylor, VP of World Advertisements, Google stated in a observation.

The Festival Bureau opened an investigation in 2020 to probe whether or not the quest engine massive had engaged in practices that hurt pageant within the on-line commercials business, and expanded the probe to incorporate Google’s promoting generation products and services previous this yr.

The investigation discovered that Google is the most important supplier around the advert tech stack for internet promoting in Canada and it “has abused its dominant place via behavior meant to make certain that it could deal with and entrench its marketplace energy,” the bureau stated on Thursday.

The case follows the U.S. Justice Division’s effort to turn Google monopolized markets for writer advert servers and advertiser advert networks.

Google has argued that the U.S. DOJ is ignoring the corporate’s reputable trade selections and that the web advertising marketplace is powerful. The corporate additionally says the U.S. govt had cherrypicked a slender slice of the web marketplace and didn’t account for competitive pageant.

The remaining arguments within the U.S. case had been made on Monday.

Previous this yr, Google introduced to promote the advert trade to finish an EU antitrust investigation however Ecu publishers rejected the proposal as inadequate, Reuters first reported in September.