United States: a complaint against Google and Meta for an anticompetitive agreement on advertising


The two tech giants, like Apple and Amazon, are accused of abuse of dominant position by a growing number of authorities in the United States

The most senior executives of Google and Meta (Facebook’s parent company) were directly involved in an illegal agreement signed in 2018 to consolidate their domination of the online advertising market, according to accusations from American states. A coalition of states led by Texas filed Friday in a New York court a new version of the text of the lawsuits initially launched against Google in December 2020.

According to their accusations, the online search giant sought to drive out competition by manipulating ad auctions – the state-of-the-art system that determines which advertisements appear on web pages based on an anonymized user’s profile. . The legal documents revealed on Friday clearly refer to Google bosses Sundar Pichai and Philipp Schindler, as well as Sheryl Sandberg for Facebook, even though her name is crossed out with a thick black line.

Dominant position

“These negotiations led in September 2018 to an agreement between Google and Facebook”, detail the state prosecutors. “Google CEO Sundar Pichai also personally approved the terms of the agreement,” they add. The complaint cites an email from Sheryl Sandberg to Mark Zuckerberg, where she describes the project as “strategically very important.” According to the prosecution, Google was concerned that an alternative system for allocating advertising space was being adopted too widely, allowing site publishers to circumvent its commissions.

The Californian group would then have convinced its neighbor to form an alliance. The two tech giants, like Apple and Amazon, are accused of abuse of dominant position by a growing number of authorities in the United States. Google holds 28.6% of the global digital advertising market in 2021, according to the firm eMarketer, just ahead of its neighbor Facebook and its 23.7% share of the cake.



Source link -123