Google Chrome Privacy Plan Faces U.K. Competition Probe
January 08 2021 - 10:56AM
Dow Jones News
By Sam Schechner
U.K. antitrust officials are investigating whether Google's plan
to remove some user-tracking tools from its Chrome browser could
hurt competition in the online-advertising industry.
The U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority said it has opened
a formal probe into Google's plan for Chrome to end support next
year of a technology called third-party cookies, which many
companies use to track individuals' browsing habits across multiple
websites.
The investigation will examine whether Google's plan -- which
hasn't yet been finalized -- could cause advertisers to shift
spending to Google's set of online-ad tools at the expense of its
competitors, the CMA said. The regulator said it has an open mind
and hasn't determined whether or not any laws have been broken.
Third-party cookies offer data that can be valuable to
advertisers for the purpose of targeting ads, but have long raised
privacy concerns, leading Google to announce last year that it
would stop using them in 2022.
"We welcome the CMA's involvement as we work to develop new
proposals to underpin a healthy, ad-supported web without
third-party cookies," a Google spokeswoman said Friday.
The probe is one of several in the U.S. and Europe stemming from
complaints that online-privacy measures from big tech companies
like Apple Inc., Facebook Inc. and Google, owned by Alphabet Inc.,
are designed, at least in part to squeeze out smaller
competitors.
The complaints highlight a potential dilemma in the growing
backlash against big tech: protecting user privacy and promoting
online competition can sometimes be at odds, particularly because
one of tech's most popular business models is targeting advertising
at individuals based on their online behavior.
In an antitrust lawsuit against Google last month, Texas and
nine other U.S. states said that Google's plans to remove
third-party cookies from Chrome, while justified on privacy
grounds, would end up increasing Google's advantage over other
companies by giving it more data than competitors. Chrome is the
most widely used web browser, with more than 60% market share
globally, according to Statcounter.
"Google's entire business model is to collect comprehensive data
about every user in the service of brokering targeted ad sales. It
then uses privacy concerns as an excuse to advantage itself over
its competitors," the lawsuit says.
In separate lawsuits against Facebook last month, the U.S.
Federal Trade Commission and 46 states argued, among other things,
that Facebook had harmed competitors that wanted to offer competing
services by cutting off their access to Facebook's platform for
third-party app developers. Facebook said at the time that the
lawsuits "misunderstand the advertising landscape and offer instead
a distorted view of how advertisers spend to reach their target
audiences."
In France, meanwhile, advertising and publishing companies in
October filed a complaint against Apple with France's competition
authority, arguing that Apple's plan to require apps to get opt-in
permission from users to collect a widely used advertising
identifier for iPhones is anticompetitive because it would deprive
many companies of needed data.
Apple responded to the complaint by saying "privacy is a
fundamental right" and that users "should get to decide whether to
share their data and with whom."
In the months since it said it would phase out third-party
cookies, Google has started work with the industry on a new
"privacy sandbox" to allow for new ways to target advertising
without compromising privacy. One such proposal would analyze
browsing on individual devices to model groups of people without
creating individual profiles, Google says.
The U.K.'s CMA said Friday that it had already been informally
looking into Google plans to phase out third-party cookies, in
collaboration with the U.K.'s privacy regulator. It decided to open
a formal probe in part because of a complaint last fall from
Marketers for an Open Web, a group that says it represents
companies in the marketing and advertising business.
The group -- which declines to name its members, citing a fear
of reprisals from Google -- argues Google's plans could cement the
company's heft in the online advertising space.
James Rosewell, the group's director, said Friday that the
investigation shows the CMA recognizes the seriousness of the
issue. "This is about the future of the Open Web and the threat
that Google poses to its development," Mr. Rosewell said.
Write to Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 08, 2021 10:41 ET (15:41 GMT)
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