Taming Google's advertising dominance

Antitrust officials have intensified their investigation of the company

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Trying to stay ahead of "growing regulatory scrutiny," Google is looking at divesting part of its advertising business, said Keach Hagey and Rob Copeland at The Wall Street Journal. Antitrust officials have intensified their investigation of the company, and last week met with state attorneys general, who are also investigating Google, to coordinate federal and state probes. They've focused increasingly on ad tools that are "used to buy and sell ads on sites across the web," not just on Google's own sites. That business "was built largely on the company's 2008 acquisition of the ad technology firm DoubleClick." More than 90 percent of large publishers use the DoubleClick tools, now known as Google Ad Manager, to promote and sell advertising space on their websites. Why? It's the only way to get full access to the world's largest ad marketplace, Google's AdX, where advertisers enter bids to reach targeted users. That gives Google dominance over "the leading selling and buying tools, and the biggest marketplace where online ad deals happen."

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Google's choices are starting to look like a rock and a hard place, said Gerrit De Vynck and Mark Bergen at Bloomberg. Anti­trust regulators are unhappy that Google controls everything from how buyers bid for ads to how sellers display them on their sites. But privacy advocates are angry about too many companies tracking your browsing. To satisfy one group of critics, Google limits advertisers' access to data. Then other critics argue that's just a "cover" to "force advertisers to play by its rules." No wonder Google executives complain that they are "stuck in a 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' situation." Indeed, said Elaine Moore at the Financial Times, everybody seems to be angry at Google. But "the impact of the investigations is unclear," because so far there are two groups that seem unconcerned: shareholders and — most important — consumers.

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