The Open Display Advertising Ecosystem: Competition Concerns and Policy Interventions

This paper investigates Google’s potentially anticompetitive practices, such as self-preferencing, discrimination against rivals, and leveraging its dominance in the ad tech industry, which, as we argue, have led to barriers to entry, distorted competition, and negatively impacted other stakeholders in the ad tech value chain. To foster a more equitable and competitive landscape, we discuss policy interventions that combine structural separation of Google’s ad server function from its remain