The French competition authority said the
agreement was the first time an antitrust regulator had taken direct aim at
Google’s online advertising infrastructure, a platform that scores of websites
worldwide rely on to sell ads.
The fine is pittance compared to Google’s
overall business — its parent company, Alphabet, earned $41 billion last year —
but French authorities hailed the concessions they got from Google because they
affect technology and practices at the heart of the company’s business.
In the United States, Google is facing
similar antitrust scrutiny over its online advertising technology from a group
of state attorneys general, as well as from Britain’s antitrust regulator.
French competition regulators said Google
used its position as the world’s largest internet advertising company to hurt
news publishers and other sellers of internet ads. Authorities said that a
service owned by the Silicon Valley giant and used by others to sell
advertising across the internet gave Google’s business preferential treatment,
undercutting competition.
As part of the settlement, French
authorities said Google agreed to end the practice of giving its services
preferential treatment and to change its advertising system so that it would
work more easily with other services.
Among the companies that complained to
French authorities about Google was News Corp., publisher of The Wall Street
Journal, and French publisher Rossel La Voix Group, the competition authority
said.
Google did not admit to wrongdoing but said
in a statement that it would make changes to increase transparency of its
online advertising systems and make the technology more interoperable with
other services.
The changes apply only in France, but
Google said some might eventually be rolled out globally.
Bruno Le Maire, the French finance
minister, embraced the agreement.
“It is essential to apply our competition
rules to the digital giants who operate in our country,” he said. The
accusations of abuse of the advertising technology are “serious,” he added,
“and they have been rightly punished.”
This article originally appeared in The NewYork Times.