Canada accuses Google of creating an ad-tech monopoly

Canada’s competition authority on Thursday accused Google of abusing its tools for buying and selling online advertising to create a monopoly, and filed a complaint seeking to force the company to sell two of its main advertising technology services.

The case strikes at the heart of Google’s business and echoes an ongoing US antitrust lawsuit against the Silicon Valley giant.

Both cases come amid four other lawsuits filed in the United States against Google since 2020 and other efforts by officials around the world to rein in the power that large technology companies like Google, Amazon and Apple hold over information and commerce online.

Canada is also attempting to use new laws to limit harms caused by social media and to require tech companies to compensate traditional news organizations.

In a statement, Canada’s Bureau of Competition Policy, a law enforcement agency, charged that Google has used its position as the largest provider of software for buying and selling ads, its marketplace for ad auctions and its services for showcasing the ads to illegally dominate the sector.

The company’s conduct, it said, ensured that the Alphabet-owned Google “would maintain and entrench its market power,” adding that it “locks market participants into using its own ad tech tools” and “prevents rivals from being able to compete on the merits of their offering.”

In addition to asking the Competition Tribunal of Canada, a quasi-judicial body, to force Google to sell two of its ad technology services, the bureau will ask to fine the company as much as 3 per cent of its worldwide revenues, which totaled more than $305 billion last year.

(Google’s ad tech services generated about $31 billion in revenues last year worldwide.)

It also wants the tribunal to order Google not to engage in anti-competitive conduct and practices.

The lawsuit brought by the US Justice Department and eight states makes similar requests. Closing arguments in that case concluded Monday; a judge will decide the merits of the case in the coming months.

As was the case when the US Justice Department brought its case in 2023, Google rejected the Canadian bureau’s charges.

The case “ignores the intense competition where ad buyers and sellers have plenty of choice and we look forward to making our case in court,” Dan Taylor, the vice president of global ads for Google, said in a statement.

Google owns four of the largest online advertising tech services in Canada and controls 40 per cent to 90 per cent of their market, the bureau said. They are involved in about 200 billion online ad sales each year in the country, the bureau said. Google has created many of those services by buying other companies that developed them.

“Google’s near-total control of the ad tech stack is by design,” the bureau said in a statement, using the industry term for Google’s services. “Through a series of related and interdependent actions, Google has, in our view, unlawfully tied together its various ad tech products.”

As an example, it said, advertisers looking to bid on ad spaces in Google’s online auction system that matches advertisers with publishers must also purchase those ads through Google’s automated auction. On the other side of transactions, the bureau said that it found Google was “dictating the terms” under which publishers who wish to list advertising opportunities on Google’s auction system can use ad tech tools from other companies.

Google sometimes intentionally loses money on ad services to undermine competitors, the bureau charged.