France fines Google and imposes amendments on the online advertising market

France's competition regulator on Monday fined Google 220 million euros ($267 million) for its practices in the online advertising market and demanded the US giant pledge global reforms.

For its part, Google said that it had agreed with the authority on a number of solutions to improve the work of the online advertising market, which it dominates.

"We will test and develop these changes in the coming months before we adopt them broadly, some of them globally," Maria Gomery, director of legal affairs at Google France, said in a reaction posted on the company's blog.

French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire welcomed the decision of the competition regulator, which allowed the punishment of "dangerous practices" of Google, he said.

"It is absolutely necessary that we push for the application of competition rules for the giants of the digital sector who are active on our lands," he added.

The procedures of the Competition Authority will include “programmatic” advertisements, that is, in which advertisers buy in real time the right to publish their advertisements on the screen of Internet users based on the personal details of each one of them.

Advertisers buy these spaces through automated bidding platforms, including Google's.

However, Google is also present in other areas of this advertising market such as ad servers, which are tools that allow publishers to offer their space for sale on the platforms.

The agency's president, Isabel de Silva, said during a press conference that Google "distorted the process in order to take advantage of it in an inappropriate way."

For example, Google's advertising space selling platform was able to see the prices of its competitors thanks to its servers of ads from the site publishers to suggest a better price for what she explained.

"This is a historic decision. It is the first in the world to address the complex algorithmic auction processes through which online ads are displayed," de Silva said.

Complainants

Three media groups, Australian-American billionaire Rupert Murdock's News Corp, France's Le Figaro newspaper (which later withdrew) and Belgium's Roussel Group, have taken to the competition regulator to file a complaint for de facto monopoly on online advertising sales.

News Corp chose to file the complaint in France because the competition authority prepared in 1998 a detailed study of the online advertising market, according to De Silva.

Europe also provides a greater possibility than the United States for economic actors to be able to pursue companies because of their dominant position in a field, while the American regulatory bodies do not have direct authority to impose financial sanctions, according to de Silva.

"They have to go to the courts" to get penalties, she said.

And Google has until mid-2022 to adopt the solutions imposed by the Competition Regulatory Authority.

"We were told it was one of Google's 10 biggest projects" this year, de Silva said, adding that "an official has been appointed to verify the implementation of the commitments" to be paid by Google.

Alphabet Inc., which owns Google, generated $55.31 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2021, mostly thanks to online advertising. The company faces complaints in several countries on the basis of competition law.