The Portuguese Competition Authority has handed over a previously undisclosed investigation into Google to the European Commission after the authorities agreed that it overlaps with an EU probe launched into the same conduct last June.
The Portuguese enforcer on Tuesday dropped its probe into Google’s alleged self-preferencing practices in the advertising technology supply chain, two months after the commission told the agency that it planned to extend the scope of its own investigation to include Portugal.
Under Regulation 1/2003, the commission can expand an investigation originally opened by a national authority to cover the entire bloc. Under those same rules, once the commission has launched a probe into a company’s anticompetitive practices, national agencies can no longer pursue an investigation into the same conduct.
The EU agency must consult the national agency before it includes its jurisdiction in a probe and the authorities must then agree on who is best placed to investigate the case.
The Portuguese authority has now handed over all the findings it had gathered throughout its probe to the commission. In a statement on Friday, the enforcer stressed that this research will help enforce competition in Portugal’s digital advertising markets.
The European Commission launched its own probe into Google’s online advertising practices in June 2021 over concerns that the company restricts third-party access to user data from across websites and apps, conserving such data for its own advertising purposes.
Its investigation focuses on several services that Google offers to both advertisers and publishers as part of the company’s advertising technology, or “ad tech”, business. Display advertising includes ads shown on websites, apps and social media through text, images, video and audio.
The Portuguese watchdog opened its own probe into Google in May, after its market study into the national digital sector raised concerns that the company was self-preferencing its own ads in search results. The agency only revealed the probe on Friday due to confidentiality restrictions.
It said its main concern was that Google potentially used information about auctions it runs for online ads – which the company’s rivals cannot access – to sway the outcome of those auctions in its own favour. The auctions determine which ads will appear on users’ pages when they browse the internet – a sector in which the agency’s digital market inquiry established Google is dominant.
Google also potentially hindered the entry of new rival auctions, amongst other conduct that could have restricted competition for publishers, the authority added.
Google did not respond to a request for comment.
The EU and national agencies frequently discuss and allocate probes, although high-profile divergences are rare. In 2020, it allowed Italy’s Competition Authority to separately investigate Amazon over alleged self-preferencing – despite launching a probe of its own. The company appealed against the commission’s decision to carve out Italy, which the EU’s General Court rejected last October.
Amazon proposed several commitments to end the EU probes in July, but the remedies did not apply to the company’s services in Italy as the national enforcer had already fined it €1.13 billion seven months prior for the same conduct.
Google has also been subject to several European probes into its digital advertising business. Last June, France’s Competition Authority fined the company €220 million for favouring its own ad server on its ad sales platform in its digital advertising auctions.
The European Commission and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority launched twin probes in March to determine if Google’s online advertising agreement with Meta, referred to as “Jedi Blue”, is an attempt to hinder the expansion of header bidding – a type of auction that allows publishers to simultaneously bid on several ad exchanges.
In July, Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service ordered Google to pay €32.6 million for abusing its dominance in the market for video hosting services by using “opaque” terms and conditions to arbitrarily suspend and block YouTube accounts.
