“The European Commission has fined Google €2.95 billion for breaching EU antitrust rules by distorting competition in the advertising technology industry. It did so by favoring its own online display advertising technology services to the detriment of competing providers of advertising technology services, advertisers and online publishers,” the EC statement said. “The Commission has ordered Google to bring these self-preferencing practices to an end and to implement measures to cease its inherent conflicts of interest along the adtech supply chain.”
Other Tech Issues To Come Into Play
Observers saw the enterprise IT impact as potentially substantial, given the large number of technology issues before regulators in Europe in addition to many other geographies.
“This fine is bigger than Google and ads. It’s Europe signaling that technology monopolies, whether in ad-tech, AI, quantum, or open source, will face scrutiny,” said Stephen Klein, CEO of Curiouser.AI and a senior lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. “For enterprise IT leaders, that means regulation is now part of the roadmap. Just as we architect for security and scalability, we’ll need to architect for compliance and fairness.”
