French competition authority Autorité de la concurrence imposed 220 million Euro fine to Google for favouring its own services in the online advertising sector. Google proposed commitments and also made a settlement with the Autorité within the scope of investigation.

The Autorité found that Google granted preferential treatment to its proprietary technologies offered under the Google Ad Manager brand, both with regard to the operation of the DFP ad server and its SSP AdX sales platform to the detriment of its competitors and publishers. According to Autorité, the said practices are particularly serious because they penalised Google's competitors in the SSP market and publishers of mobile sites and applications. Among these, the press groups were affected even though their economic model is also strongly weakened by the decline in sales of print subscriptions and the decline in associated advertising revenue.

These practices are all the more serious as they took place in a still emerging market with strong growth and they may have affected the ability of competitors to develop in the market. In particular, they have limited the attractiveness of ad servers and third-party SSPs from a publisher's perspective, and have enabled Google to significantly increase its market share and its already high revenues. In this regard, the Autorité notes that several of Google's competitors experienced significant difficulties during the period of the practices, while Google benefited from strong growth in its activity and revenues, even increasing its already considerable market share on a rapidly growing market. Moreover, not only competitors affected from these practices but also publishers for their part have been deprived of the possibility of making full use of the competition between the various SSPs.

In conclusion, due to Google behaving like that even though it was regularly alerted to the importance of compliance with competition rules considering previous cases by both the European Commission and the Autorité considering the previous cases and appearing to be a particularly well-informed economic player, the Autorité imposed a 220 million euros fine against Google and made following commitments proposed by Google mandatory for three years:

• offer third-party SSPs an interoperability modality with the DFP server allowing competition on the merits between AdX and third-party SSPs for the purchase of inventories from publishers using DFP. This commitment involves:
  • to allow fair access to information on the auction process for third-party SSPs,
  • to preserve the full contractual freedom of third-party SSPs so that they can negotiate special conditions with publishers or to make the wished buyers,
  • to ensure that AdX no longer uses the price of its competitors in order to optimise its bids in a way that is not reproducible by third-party SSPs,
  • to offer guarantees of technical stability, both for third-party SSPs and for publishers,
  • to make changes to existing configurations that allow publishers using third-party ad servers to access AdX on-demand in "real-time" .

Google has also undertaken to appoint an independent trustee, remunerated by it, who will be in charge of monitoring the implementation of these commitments, and will transmit all the information enabling the Autorité to exercise its control over these commitments. The Autorité considered that these commitments are likely to promote the restoration of compliance for Google and improve the competitive functioning of the market for ad servers and SSP platforms.

(Autorité de la concurrence – 07.06.2021)

This document provides general information on the subject and does not constitute a legal opinion or recommendation. Consulting a specialist is recommended before taking an action. No claim arising from the content of or relating to this document can be asserted against NAZALI.