After the British competition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), online advertising players are turning to the European Commission.
Movement for an Open Web (MOW), a coalition of technology, advertising and publishing companies filed a complaint last week in Brussels against Google's new “
Privacy SandBox
”
initiative
.
With the abandonment of third-party cookies by the American giant on its Chrome browser, which is due to take place at the end of 2023, the
“Privacy SandBox”
is supposed to let advertisers collect information about users, while being more respectful of their privacy.
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Third-party cookies help businesses target their advertisements effectively and therefore fund free online content. These advertising trackers allow advertisers to obtain information on the profile of Internet users, their preferences, their browsing history on different sites, whether or not they have clicked on an ad and where on the page. They are generated automatically by the site visited and give rise to personalized advertising.
In a post-third-party cookie world, the “
Privacy SandBox
”, an “
open API suite
”, must allow targeted advertising to be served.
All the data collected will be stored directly in its Chrome browser and advertisers will be able to access it through its APIs.
Concretely, instead of studying the behavior of users "
person by person
" on the Internet, Google now wants to group Internet users into anonymized cohorts: groups made up of several thousand Internet users who share a similar profile according to their areas of interest. .
Anti-competitive practices
However, online advertising players fear that the changes planned by the American giant will actually strengthen its domination in the sector.
"We call on the European Commission to create a level playing field for all digital businesses to maintain and protect an open web,
" said Tim Cowen, MOW Legal Counsel and Chairman of Antitrust Practice at Preiskel & Co LLP.
The coalition of companies believes that the changes made by Google will affect independent analytics, advertising, fraud detection, data services, performance optimization and other features of the open web.
While increasing the value of the data that Google will receive
"because of its scale and built-in services like search, Chrome and Android".
Last June, the European Commission opened a formal investigation into possible anti-competitive practices in the display of Google's online advertisements.
On this occasion, Margrethe Vestager, the vice-president of the Commission in charge of competition, already explained that Brussels would look into the “
Privacy Sandbox
” of the American giant.
The new complaint, filed with the EU last week, calls on officials to order Google to notify authorities of future browser changes.
This power would thus go beyond a potential regulation that Google proposed to the British authorities, in order to put an end to their investigation into the
“PrivacySandbox”.
To prove its good faith and avoid antitrust sanctions, Google had indeed made a series of commitments to the CMA.
These investigations by the British and European regulator could well delay Google's project.