Google and Facebook (Meta, now) are two giants of the online advertising market, and their dominance is once again under the scrutiny of regulators. It is that both the United Kingdom and the European Union announced that they will investigate both corporations for allegedly falling into anticompetitive conduct; and the starting point is an agreement between them that is known as Jedi Blue.
Basically, the European Commission and the British Competition and Markets Authority will seek to prove that Google and Meta colluded to dominate the online advertising business, without bothering each other and preventing other companies from gaining a foothold in the sector.
According to Margrethe Vestager, Competition Commissioner of the European regulatory body, the agreement between the US firms would have aimed at weakening the technologies that could compete against Google's Open Bidding, to exclude them from the market and prevent them from being used to display ads in applications. and websites. "If confirmed by our research, this would restrict and distort competition in the already concentrated advertising market, to the detriment of rival ad serving technologies, publishers and ultimately consumers," he said.
On the side of the UK Competition and Markets Authority, the vision is similar. "We are concerned that Google may have partnered with Meta to put obstacles in the way of competitors who provide important online display advertising services to publishers. If one company has a stranglehold on a certain area, it can make it difficult for startups and smaller companies enter the market and ultimately it can reduce customer choice," said Andrea Coscelli, chief executive of the British body.
It's not the first time Google and Meta have come under fire over Jedi Blue
What is known as Jedi Blue is an agreement that Google and Facebook apparently signed in 2018. In it, those from Mountain View would have given advantages to the social network to access its auction system for online ads; in exchange, those led by Mark Zuckerberg would have abandoned the development of their own advertising technology intended to compete with Google's.
As a consequence of this, the company now known as Meta would also have definitively abandoned the investment over any other online advertising system. For this reason, the regulators of the United Kingdom and the European Union intend to know if the companies advanced with this arrangement knowing that it could be very damaging for the rest of the market.
In the United States, Jedi Blue is already under legal scrutiny. Let us remember that, although the association between Google and Meta would have occurred at least 4 years ago, it was publicly known in early 2021. Since then, 15 state attorney generals have sued both firms over this issue.
From the European Commission they have mentioned that there are no legal deadlines to deliver the results of the antitrust investigation. This means that regulators will take as long as they deem necessary to try to prove their point; and they also explained that there will be cooperation with the British Competition and Markets Authority during its corresponding investigation.
It will be interesting to see how this story progresses. Let us remember that both Google and Meta have historically had a tense relationship with the regulators of the Old Continent. Among the most recent events, Mark Zuckerberg's firm is in the middle of a bid with the United Kingdom for the purchase of Giphy; and it also threatened (although it later backed down) to close its most important services in Europe, in disagreement with its privacy regulations.
Google, meanwhile, has had endless crosses with the European Commission, with large fines included. The Mountain Viewers have come under scrutiny before for their advertising business, their popular search engine, Android, and even their virtual assistant.
