UK’s competition regulator asks for views on breaking up Google

• The U.K.’s competition regulator has raised concerns about the market power of digital ad platform giants Google and Facebook in an interim report published today, opening up a consultation on a range of potential interventions — from breaking up platform giants to limiting their ability to set self-serving defaults and enforcing data sharing and/or feature interoperability to help rivals compete.
• Breaking up Google by forcing it to separate its ad server arm from the rest of the business is one of a number of possible interventions it’s eyeing, along with enforcing choice screens for search engines and browsers that use non-monetary criteria to allocate slots — versus Google’s plan for a pay-to-play offering for EU Android users (which rivals argue does not offer relief for the antitrust abuse the European Commission sanctioned last year).
• The U.K. regulator is also considering whether to require Facebook  to interoperate specific features of its current network so they can be accessed by competitors — as a fix for what it describes as “strong network effects” which work against “new entrant and challenger social media platforms.”
• The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA)  launched the market study in July — a couple of weeks after the U.K.’s data watchdog published its own damning report setting out major privacy and other concerns around programmatic advertising.

 

 

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