The European Commission announced on Friday the start of an antitrust investigation into an agreement between Google LLC and Meta Platforms Inc. The European Union suspects the deal, codenamed "Jedi Blue" and signed in 2018, was meant to exclude ad tech services competing with Google's Open Bidding program.
"Many publishers rely on online display advertising to fund online content for consumers. Via the so-called 'Jedi Blue' agreement between Google and Meta, a competing technology to Google's Open Bidding may have been targeted with the aim to weaken it and exclude it from the market for displaying ads on publisher websites and apps. If confirmed by our investigation, this would restrict and distort competition in the already concentrated ad tech market, to the detriment of rival ad serving technologies, publishers and ultimately consumers," said Commission Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager.
