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Google’s Antitrust Woes Mount as Turkey Levels Another Fine

By  |  July 10, 2025
Google, lawsuits, DOJ, antitrust, advertising

Google’s antitrust problems continue to mount. On Thursday, the Turkish Competition Authority fined the search giant ₺355 million ($8.9 million) for failing to make good on commitments made as part of a previous antitrust investigation by rolling out interface design changes the Authority said deepen Google’s dominance of the search and advertising markets.

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    The TCA accused Google of deliberately introducing changes that “violated the obligations determined during the compliance process,” a move the regulator said weakened competitors in search and ad markets, Techeconomy reports.

    The newest fine is separate from an antitrust investigation TCA launched last month into Google’s Performance Max (PMAX) tool that combines user data and uses AI to find optimal placement for a brand’s ads across Google’s platforms, including email, search, and YouTube.

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    That investigation and Thursday’s fine are not Google’s first brushes with Turkey’s competition enforcers. In December 2024 it was fined ₺2.61 billion ($75 million) over limits on third-party access to YouTube ad inventory, which in turn followed a ₺482 million fine over hotel search results.

    Related: Turkey Opens Antitrust Investigation into Google Over Digital Advertising Practices

    Google’s travel industry woes are not limited to Turkey. Earlier this week, it failed to reach an agreement with a group of travel websites on search rankings in talks hosted by the European Commission, Reuters reported Wednesday, increasing the odds that Google could face substantial penalties under the Digital Markets Act.

    Separately, per Reuters, a group of publishers hit Google with an antitrust complaint in the European Union, over Google’s AI Overviews feature that provides summaries of information scraped from websites in response to search queries before providing links to those sites.

    “Google’s core search engine service is misusing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss,” the complaint read.

    Google’s biggest antitrust headaches, however, are closer to home. Two federal courts have separately ruled the company maintains illegal monopolies over search and over the online advertising ecosystem, in cases brought by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, respectively.

    The courts are now considering whether Google should be forced to divest key parts of its empire, including the Chrome browser and pieces of its ad-tech stack.