European Commission asks companies for details about Google's ad contracts and scraping as it deepens its antitrust investigation
EU Deepens Antitrust Investigation Into Google's Practices — The EU is stepping up its investigation into allegations that Google abuses its dominance …
Context & Ripple Effects
This questionnaire marks an escalation in a probe that began with publishers and rivals: months earlier, the European Commission had sought permission to publish the confidentially filed antitrust complaints from shopping, local, and travel firms that put Google's conduct on the regulator's agenda. By asking companies directly about ad contract terms and scraping, Brussels is moving from filed grievances toward its own evidence base.
The arc matters because the same two threads — advertising economics and data collection — recur across the Commission's later work, from the preliminary investigation into how Google gathers and monetizes data for ads to the eventual formal probe into whether Google favors its own display ad tech over rivals.
First-order effects
- Advertisers, publishers, and sites scraped by Google are being asked to hand over contract terms and evidence of scraping to the European Commission, converting private commercial friction into documented regulatory record.
Second-order effects
- Google now faces discovery pressure on both fronts at once — ad contracts and data practices — raising the cost of defending each practice separately and pushing the company toward concessions that pre-empt a formal infringement finding.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the Commission's method of building cases through successive questionnaires and complaint publication becomes a template: dominance cases assembled from rival testimony first, market-wide data gathering second, formal charges third — as later seen in the display ad tech investigation.
The trend: EU antitrust enforcement against Google is shifting from reacting to individual competitor complaints toward systematically reconstructing how its ad business and data collection lock in dominance.