EU files new round of antitrust charges against Google related to AdSense and AdWords
European officials are expected on Thursday to announce a new round of antitrust charges against Google, according to two people briefed on the matter. — The charges relate to some of the technology …
Context & Ripple Effects
This charge sheet lands a year after European publishers and firms banded together in civil lawsuits against Google, giving the regulator a ready-made complainant base for the AdSense and AdWords case. It also extends an enforcement arc that has already produced one shopping-comparison case and now turns to the advertising technology itself.
The significance is that Brussels is moving from search results to the ad stack — the pipes that price and place ads across third-party sites — where Google sits on both the buy side and the sell side.
First-order effects
- Google now faces formal EU charges on two more product lines, AdSense and AdWords, on top of its existing shopping case, raising the prospect of parallel remedies across its ad business.
- The European publishers behind the coordinated civil suits gain regulatory momentum, since the Commission's findings can feed private claims.
Second-order effects
- Settlement leverage shifts toward Brussels: with multiple open fronts, Google's incentive to negotiate a broad package grows rather than resolve cases one at a time — a dynamic that later coverage shows dragging on, with regulators' frustration over slow settlement talks persisting for years.
- Rival ad networks and intermediaries gain a compliance opening to pitch publishers on diversifying away from Google's bundled serving and auction tools.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Google's ad business becomes subject to rolling, regime-spanning EU enforcement — from these 2016 charges through the later DMA breach charges and the probe into whether Google artificially inflated ad auction clearing prices — making ad tech the longest-running antitrust battleground in Europe.
- Structurally, the case points toward forced separation or interoperability remedies in ad tech, where owning the full stack is treated as the competition problem rather than any single contract.
The trend: EU regulation of Google is converging on its advertising technology stack, with each successive case narrowing in on how the ad auction itself is run.