Germany's antitrust regulator opening probe into online advertising industry as concerns arise over dominance of Google and Facebook and use of consumer data
Reuters : Tweets: @vijayshekhar Tweets: Vijay Shekhar / @vijayshekhar : Surprisingly India will have far more dominating numbers of these two, and someday this antitrust probe too. http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This probe is the opening move in what became a multi-year European campaign against ad-tech data practices. The Bundeskartellamt's 2018 concern about Google and Facebook's dominance of online advertising prefigured the EU regulator's own preliminary investigations into how the two companies gather and monetize ad data in late 2019, and Italy's display-ad abuse case against Google a year after that.
First-order effects
- Google and Facebook face formal scrutiny of their German advertising businesses, with consumer-data collection now framed as an antitrust issue rather than only a privacy one.
Second-order effects
- National regulators followed the template: the EU opened its own data-for-advertising investigations into both companies, and Italy's authority pursued Google on a dominant-position complaint in display ads — multiplying legal exposure across jurisdictions.
Third-order effects
- By 2021 the German regulator had escalated to an in-depth analysis of Google's data processing terms and a probe of News Showcase publisher terms, suggesting the pattern holds toward case-by-case dismantling of cross-service data advantages rather than a single sweeping ruling.
The trend: European antitrust authorities are converging on data accumulation itself — not just pricing or bundling — as the theory of harm against ad-platform gatekeepers.