The first thing people think of when they hear Google is the search engine. It absolutely is their most prominent product, and more crucially, their first product and thus synonymous with the name of the company as a whole. However, and this is no surprise to anyone who spends any amount of time online, Google owns a lot more products now. Gmail, Drive, YouTube, Maps…
But their biggest one, by far, is advertising.
People are somewhat aware of this, mostly that youtube makes money by stuffing ads down our throats. But Google shows ads in search engine and maps, and on every website you visit.
The way it works is that website owners add some slots on their page for google to show ads on. Every time the page is loaded on a user's computer, the javascript code looks at the google accounts that are on the browser and determines what ads to show the user. This is how nearly every website you visit shows ads by google. Google does pay the websites for the privilege of showing ads on their website.
The website on which ads are shown is nearly irrelevant to the content of the ad, instead being nearly completely determined by the identity of the site visitor. This means that google can very reliably target ads to a specific demographic. Companies looking to advertise can select their target demographic when buying ad campaigns on the google advertiser portal.
Having an advertising service, while simultaneously having products that need advertising and whose competitors need advertising, is a conflict of interest. Especially for an advertiser that has a market share like Google, this can raise concerns about anti-competitive behaviour.
It's amazing how so many free market turn into monopolies without government intervention. Almost as if the idea of a free market is a fairy tale.
In recent years, Google has fallen afoul of multiple regulatory bodies.
The US Department of Justice accused Google in 2023 of monopolizing the advertising technology market. The European Union did the same in 2022. This is now followed by Canada's Competition Bureau's plans to sue Google for the same - anti-competitive business practices in the online advertising market.
The common accusations here are that Google forces prospective ad buyers into using its own tools. For example, ad exchanges (where people buy and sell ad slots) owned by google provide insider info about pricing, and exporting ad performance data to non-google analytics tools may not contain all the data.
Unrelated, but this is similar to how podcasts used to be all about RSS feeds, and Spotify came in and ruined it by not providing an episode feed.
Google has also been accused of taking on predatorily low prices and using exclusivity clauses in its agreements.
Trials are underway in all three jursidictions, and Google might be forced to sell off some of the advertising tools, pay fines, and promise to change its behaviour.
Yes, I believe a lot of these penalties turn out to be slaps on the wrist, but I hope to be proven wrong.
Google's VP of Global Ads gave a predictable statement, saying that "the complaint ignores intense competition" in the market and that their tools "help websites and apps fund their content, and enable businesses of all sizes to effectively reach new customers", which to me sounds a lot like "the complaint is wrong, and even if it was right, we do a lot of good so we should be allowed to do some bad."