EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS

Prague, Czechia

EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS 2022

collecting and analyzing data about the internet users and either uses it for its own personalized advertising or sells the data to third parties for the similar purposes (Daly, 2017, p. 189). The advertising is also one of the reasons, why many internet services can be provided free – the revenues are dependent on the advertisement (European Commission [online], 2021). The Commission opened the investigation in this case because Google might have restricted access to collected data from other competitors and used the data only favoring its own advertisement technology services. Furthermore, Google might have restricted other competitors by making it mandatory for the advertisers to use technology provided solely by Google. Explicitly excluding the advertisement technologies provided by other competitors on various websites. Google also showed various other allegedly anticompetitive actions such as the announcement of a plan prohibiting cookies of third parties on Chrome (Google’s web service). The report on the opening of the investigation states that in case of confirming the afore described conduct, Google would breach Article 101 and Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union which would include the Google Search / Google Shopping and AdSense case, yet another major ex post regulative attempt of the Commission to tackle the question what is allowed innovative conduct of big tech giant and what is harmful for the competition. Maybe it is time for some rather ex ante regulation to take place. 3.4 Is there anything in common? All of three cases above concern operations of Google on so called (as will be explained below) core platform services. Google’s role in the cases “gatekeeping” the access to the relevant market, to decide the faith of the portal between the end costumers and business customers. Google Search and Google advertising seem to have the anticompetitive approach to innovative technologies in common. In the first case, Google prioritized its shopping comparison services before the competition by listing the results within the general search results in so called “One Box”, which is a rather innovative technology for the search services. However, the leveraging practice and abuse of the dominance of Google on the general search market were not compatible with the internal market. There is still little known about the third case, but it seems that Google, once again, used an innovative technology for its own advantage while at the same time harming both the other competition and end costumers. In the AdSense case, Google abused its dominance in the market to force both the advertisers and publishers, by the contractual clauses, to strengthen its position by giving it anticompetitive advantage which consequently led to distortion of the relevant market.

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