“Self-preferencing” limits competition
As the CMA explains it, digital advertising has various intermediaries that facilitate the sale of online advertising space on websites or mobile apps between two key parties: sellers, aka publishers, and buyers, aka advertisers.
Google acts as an intermediary in three key parts of the advertising chain: It operates ad-buying tools for advertisers, Google Ads and DV360; it provides a publisher ad server for publishers, DoubleClick For Publishers (DFP); and also operates an ad exchange, AdX, that receives requests for bids from publishers and responding bids from advertisers, and then conducts an auction to match these two sides.
The provisional findings by the CMA relate to anti-competitive “self-preferencing” by Google. Since at least 2015, Google has abused its dominant positions through the operation of both its buying tools and publisher ad server in order to strengthen AdX’s market position and to protect AdX from competition from other exchanges, according to the CMA.