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Europe seeks break-up of Google ad business – only a break-up of Google’s ad-tech business would satisfy their concerns
Posted by on June 14, 2023 at 12:02 pmCurrently labeled as breaking news – https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/14/google-antitrust-europe/
>> European Union regulators have issued a preliminary finding that Google must sell off some of its lucrative digital advertising business, part of a sweeping antitrust complaint targeting one of the search giant’s most important revenue drivers.
>> “This leads to a situation of inherent conflicts of interest for Google,” the E.U. statement reads. “The Commission’s preliminary view is therefore that only the mandatory divestment by Google of part of its services would address its competition concerns.”
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1 Reply
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Is this related to search ads or their Google display network?
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And which companies could afford to buy some of their advertising business, other than a few of the other mega corporations?
Also, “*targeting one of the search giant’s most important revenue drivers*”… advertising isn’t one of their most important revenue drivers, it is THE most important revenue driver, by far. It is their core business.
If this is going to be realistic, they need to be specific about what Google needs to sell off. I’m all for antitrust laws but I’m not sure what this accomplishes.
The main problem is that Google controls both sides of the equation:
* They sell the ads that appear on the search engine that they own.
* They sell the ads that appear on the display network that they run.
* They sell the ads that appear on YouTube, which they ownTherefore, if we’re ever going to eliminate their conflicts of interest, they need to sell one half of each of those. The search engine, the display network, and YouTube themselves don’t make money, the ads on them do. So the only thing that would make sense is if they sold those but kept Google Ads, which serves the ads across all of them and is the part that prints money for them.
Whoever bought the search engine, or the display network, or YouTube (or if they were just broken off into new companies), they could at least then serve ads from other platforms to compete with Google’s, even if that competition would likely be minimal.
Honestly the more I think about it, the more I love the idea of them selling their search engine, because they are utterly destroying it over the past year and organic search traffic to sites is drying up and killing businesses.
I doubt any of that would happen but that’s the only solution I see toward them making regulators somewhat happy without totally losing their cash cows.
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They should, split it up into 3 companies. Service level has gone downhill
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