OTTAWA (Reuters) – Canada's Competition Bureau is suing Alphabet's (NASDAQ:) Google for alleged anti-competitive conduct in online advertising, the antitrust watchdog said on Thursday.
The Competition Bureau, in a statement, said it had made an application to the Competition Tribunal seeking an order that would, among other things, require Google to sell two of its advertising technology tools. It is also seeking a sanction from Google to promote compliance with Canada's competition laws, according to the statement.
A Google spokesperson said the complaint “ignores the intense competition where ad buyers and sellers have many options and we look forward to presenting our case in court.”
The Competition Bureau opened an investigation in 2020 to investigate whether the search engine giant had engaged in practices that harm competition in the online advertising industry, and expanded the investigation to include Google's advertising technology services in early this year.
The case follows the US Justice Department's effort to show that Google has monopolized markets for publishers' ad servers and advertisers' ad networks.
Closing arguments in the U.S. case were presented Monday.
Earlier this year, Google offered to sell the ad exchange to end an EU antitrust investigation, but European publishers rejected the proposal as insufficient, Reuters first reported in September.
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