Competition Bureau's legal action against Google puts major U.S. cases in 'Canadian context'
CBC
Canada's Competition Bureau launched a legal fight against Google on Thursday, saying the tech giant has used its power in online advertising to hurt competition and harm Canadian businesses.
The bureau wants Google to sell off two of its advertising technology tools and pay penalties for what it calls anti-competitive behaviour in Canada's digital advertising market.
The case targets how Google buys and sells online advertising — the ads that appear when people visit websites. Publishers rely on this ad revenue to stay in business, while advertisers use these systems to reach customers. The bureau says Google has too much control over this entire process.
Canada's antitrust watchdog has built a strong case against Google's advertising technology by learning from recent U.S. legal actions, said Jennifer Quaid, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa's law faculty.
"The bureau has done a pretty good job. They go to a lot of trouble explaining the factual situation, which of course tracks how the U.S. has described it, but they've also adapted it to the Canadian context."
Google has faced three major antitrust cases in the United States in the past year. In the first case, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled in August that Google violated U.S. antitrust law through its dominant search business, after the Justice Department alleged the company paid billions of dollars to be the default search engine on phones and browsers. Google says it intends to appeal the decision.
The second case, in which closing arguments were heard on Monday, targets Google's advertising technology business, with the Justice Department seeking to break up parts of its ad tech operations. The third case, decided in December 2023 by a jury in California, found Google's app store practices are anti-competitive — a decision the company is challenging in court.
"We got all these things coming from multiple different angles," said Dwayne Winseck, a professor at Carleton University's school of journalism and communication in Ottawa.
"Each one of these decisions talks about several things in common — the acquisition of a monopoly through a series of ownership acquisitions over the last 15 years and that it has built protective moats around the dominant market power or monopolies that it has acquired," he said.
"These defensive strategies have had severe consequences downstream on everyday users and particularly on businesses and third parties that rely on search, advertising and platform distribution for their very livelihood."
The Competition Bureau case targets the systems that control how websites sell advertising space and how advertisers bid to place their ads.
"Google has abused its dominant position in online advertising in Canada by engaging in conduct that locks market participants into using its own ad tech tools, excluding competitors and distorting the competitive process," Matthew Boswell, the bureau's commissioner of competition, is quoted as saying in a news release.
The agency's investigation resulted in several specific allegations about Google's conduct. The company allegedly tied its various ad tech tools together, making it difficult for customers to use competing services. It gave its own tools preferential access to advertising inventory and took negative margins in certain circumstances to disadvantage rivals.
The bureau also found that Google dictated terms to publisher customers about how they could transact with rival ad tech tools.
