UK: Competition regulator asks for views on breaking up Google

The UK’s competition regulator has raised concerns about the market power of digital ad platform giants Google and Facebook in an interim report published Wednesday, December 18, opening up a consultation on a range of potential inventions, from breaking up platform giants, to limiting their ability to set self-serving defaults, and enforcing data sharing and/or feature interoperability to help rivals compete.

According to TechChrunch, breaking up Google by forcing it to separate its ad server arm from the rest of the business is one of a number of possible interventions the regulator is eyeing, along with enforcing choice screens for search engines and browsers that use non-monetary criteria to allocate slots vs Google’s plan for a pay-to-play offering for EU Android users.

The UK regulator is also considering whether to require Facebook to interoperate specific features of its current network so they can be accessed by competitors, as a fix for what it describes as “strong network effects” which work against “new entrant and challenger social media platforms.”

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched the market study in July, a couple of weeks after the UK’s data watchdog published its own report setting out major privacy and other concerns around programmatic advertising.

It is due to issue a final report next summer, which will set out conclusions and recommendations for interventions, and is now consulting on suggestions in its interim report, inviting contributions before February 12.

Full Content: Tech Crunch

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