ADIF Files Complaint with CCI Against Google’s Anti-Competitive Ad Practices

The Alliance of Digital India Foundation has approached CCI with a complaint against global tech giant Google’s anti-competitive activities in digital advertising.

The foundation has come against the ‘market dominance’ of “Google” and has said it’s ‘purportedly abusive behavior’ in the online search and display ads market. According to a statement by the ADIF Google holds the numero uno position amongst major online platforms and which essentially is reliant 100% on just advertising to derive almost 80% of its earnings, which in reality is crushing competition and causing serious detriment to the Indian businesses.

“ADIF has filed a detailed complaint with the CCI highlighting how Google indulges in and effects anti-competitive practices in the digital marketplace with the collusion of unscrupulous sections of the online ad tech companies. ADIF argues that since Google is controlling all major online platforms and it earns 97 per cent of its revenue through such practices, it is now carrying out such practices with impunity that are impacting businesses in India adversely,” the statement said.

The company has also expressed worries about Google’s ad-ranking system being problematic for its opacity. Their ad-ranking system is quoted as a black-box approach by EPAG which will leave the advertisement clients devoid of the services that will be bought by them. “ADIF argues that Google’s practices in relation to trademark usage in keyword bidding create artificial inflation in prices of advertisements. Google allows competitors to bid on trademarked keywords, leading to a war in bidding that ultimately benefits Google to the detriment of advertisers and trademark owners in general,” the statement said.

In a statement, ADIF also said that enforcement of Google’s ad policy is inconsistent, and its review and redressal processes in place are opaque.

“Our complaint to the CCI is very important as this will ensure that this important market operates on the principle of fairness, transparency, and equitable competition. We believe addressing these issues is going to help not just advertisers and publishers but also bring innovation and a more vibrant digital economy into India,” Prateek Jain, associate director-Startup and Alliances, ADIF, said according to PTI.

The complaints of ADIF also pointed to the way in which Google leverages supremacy in the entire value chain of the ad tech stack.

“Google engages in self-preferencing by tying its products together, like DoubleClick for Publishers with AdX, and Display & Video 360 with AdX. That reduces competitors’ access to the market and hurts directly startups that depend on these services. What worries ADIF a lot is that all this, which comes from Google, the Privacy Sandbox, would get rid of all the third-party cookies on the web accessed through the Google Chrome browser—an act that woul very greatly harm the capabilities of non-Google demand-side platforms in serving advertisers effectively,” continued ADIF in their statement.

It also added that the body expects that the CCI’s investigation will encourage Google to voluntarily rectify some of the said issues.
Moreover, CCI will possibly bring both behavioural as well as structural remedies in action against the assumed abuse of Google’s dominance position
It is an obligation to rectify these market imbalances at the earliest possible as spends in digital advertising keep ballooning, said ADIF.