European regulators are reportedly set to hit Google’s parent Alphabet with a recent antitrust criticism targeting the tech giant’s lucrative digital promoting business.
The latest formal allegations against Google are expected to be unveiled on Wednesday by the European Commission, the European Union’s antitrust authority, reported Bloomberg on Monday.
The criticism will ‘goal on the core’ of Google’s ‘ads tech business model’ in what it intends to be ‘most vital in its current five-year term’ European Commissionsaid a source aware of the matter.
The impending levy list would mean one other regulatory setback for Google’s parent Alphabet, which also faces a string of major US antitrust actions targeting various segments of its business empire.
Google has already been fined 3 times within the European Union price $8.6 billion since 2017.
The total included a record tremendous of greater than $4 billion for Google’s business practices related to the Android operating system. Google continues to challenge this penalty in court.
The digital promoting giant Google accounts for as much as 80% of the corporate’s annual revenue. In 2022 alone, Google generated roughly $225 billion from online ad sales.
A Google spokesperson declined to comment.
EU antitrust officials are investigating Google’s digital promoting model starting in 2021, in line with the report. Authorities investigated whether Google had unfairly blocked competitors from accessing user data for their very own digital promoting efforts.
In April, 17 states joined the Justice Department’s antitrust division in a federal lawsuit accusing Google of getting a monopoly on the digital promoting market.
The lawsuit alleges that Google uses “anti-competitive, exclusionary and illegal measures to eliminate or significantly reduce any threats to its dominance over digital promoting technologies.”
The Department of Justice says Google must be forced to sell its ad manager suite entirely. The company denied engaging in anti-competitive business practices and asked a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit.
In the US, Google is facing a separate federal antitrust lawsuit targeting its search activities, which is as a result of start in September.
The feds are also investigating the corporate’s Google Maps operations and whether it stifled competition by requiring app developers to make use of maps and search products as a part of its terms of service.
