Union urges Competition Bureau to release an update on Google ad probe

Investigation began in October 2021

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Canada’s largest private sector union wants to know whether Alphabet Inc.’s Google has engaged in anti-competitive behaviour in the country’s online display advertising industry.

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Unifor said it wrote to competition commissioner Matthew Boswell to find out if there has been any movement at the Competition Bureau to release its findings on the civil investigation, which began in October 2021.

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“Every day that Google is allowed to monopolize ad revenue, more harm is inflicted on the Canadian news industry, which has a negative impact on democracy as a whole,” national president Lana Payne said in a March 29 press release.

The Competition Bureau initiated the probe to investigate how ads are sold on Google’s YouTube platform and whether the tech giant’s dominance was reducing competition elsewhere in the “ecosystem” of online advertising.

Boswell’s investigation is meant to determine if Google is impeding the success of competitors, resulting in higher prices and reduced choice — which Unifor said hinders innovation for advertising technology services and harms advertisers, publishers and consumers.

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The probe includes an order to have Google produce records and written information relevant to the agency’s inquiry.

Unifor represents Toronto-based staff of the Financial Post and National Post and at other Postmedia publications including the Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, Toronto Sun, Windsor Star, London Free Press, Regina Leader-Post, Saskatoon StarPhoenix, and Vancouver Sun.

Postmedia Network Canada Corp., which publishes the Financial Post and National Post, last year signed a deal with Google under which it receives an undisclosed payment from the Alphabet subsidiary in exchange for sharing content from its various publications. Postmedia also supports Bill C-18, the Online News Act, which would force Google and other digital platforms to compensate news providers for the content they use on their sites.

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Earlier probe

An earlier probe into Google’s online search and search advertising was shelved by the Canadian competition watchdog in 2016, but the tech giant has faced increasing scrutiny around the world since then, particularly in the United States.

“Since the time the inquiry began, Canada’s crisis in the news media sector, particularly in newspapers, has continued to worsen,” Unifor said, noting that its membership has been impacted with hundreds of local news operations shuttering as a result of dropping ad revenue.

Google sells online advertising space to advertisers in Canada, and elsewhere, through a handful of owned and operated properties including YouTube. It also provides online advertising technology services to both advertisers and publishers who buy and sell online advertising space.

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The company and handful of other tech giants — including Meta Platforms Inc., which operates Facebook, and Amazon.com Inc. — now account for 90 per cent of internet ad spending in Canada, Unifor said. This growth in online advertising continues to outpace traditional media, the union said.

Unifor represents 12,000 journalists and media workers in television, newspapers, magazines, news websites and film production. “News outlets are closing, consolidating and downsizing. We need Google to pay its fair share to save local news,” Unifor media director Randy Kitt said in the press release.

In January, the U.S. federal government and eight states sued Google, accusing it of abusing monopoly in ad technology and urging the search giant to sell its ad manager suite.

Denying any wrongdoing, Alphabet on March 27 asked a U.S. federal judge to dismiss the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit.

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