Britain’s competition regulator said it would use its expanded powers over the world’s largest tech companies to regulate Google’s online advertising, including potentially clamping down on its ability to reach far-flung customers with its ads or letting its search results direct users to its own products.
Alphabet-owned Google should be designated a provider of “strategic market status” in the UK that should give the competition watchdog the power to come down hard in the search-advertising sector up to “restore competitive levels of innovation and growth”, the CMA said on Tuesday.
The designation, if confirmed in October, would force Google to increase its transparency for publishers, make it easier for rival search engines to be used in Android, and make data portable for competitors.
Google, which processes over 90% of Britain’s online searches, had brought many benefits, but the regulator had found that there were ways to make markets more competitive and innovative, CMA Chief Executive Sarah Cardell said.
“These targeted and proportionate measures would provide UK businesses with the opportunity to grow and thrive in upcoming digital markets, whilst reducing their reliance on Google’s search services – unlocking opportunities for innovation in the UK’s tech sector and beyond,” she said.
Millions of Britons used Google as a window to the web, and upwards of 200,000 businesses relied on Google search advertising to reach customers, the regulator said.
he CMA, which gained prominence around the world when Britain left the European Union, said it hoped to use its new powers to check the power of tech giants like Google, Apple, Meta and Microsoft without ending up clamping down on investment or growth.
Its selective approach contrasts with the EU’s arm’s-length enforcement of digital regulations as well as Britain’s efforts to limit the dominance of U.S. tech giants while embracing the opportunities digital can bring post-Brexit.
New powers
Cardell said CMA outlined a road map of changes the company could implement before a final decision in October.
In a statement Tuesday, Google said that the CMA’s SMS designation “does not achieve” evidence of anticompetitive behaviors, but that its announcement reflected obvious threats to key parts of its business in Britain.
“We continue to be concerned that the CMA’s scope of consideration is too wide and focuses on fixed intervention items before any evidence, and that it is prescribing solutions such as algorithmic changes without understanding the potential consequences,” said Oliver Bethell, Google’s senior director for competition.
The CMA said it intended to take additional steps to tackle more complex problems, from 2026, including potential issues with Google’s treatment of competing specialised search providers and with transparency and control over search advertising.
The regulator’s second investigation under its new powers into mobile operating systems is also aimed at Google, but also Apple. It would again make the company a recipient of a designation that focuses on the company’s Android operating system.
Google has faced mounting regulatory pressure in the US and EU across search, advertising, AI and digital platform activity.
In the past year, it has been found in two weighty U.S. rulings to have monopolised search and search advertising, charges it denies, and in March the European Commission accused it of breaking the bloc’s competition laws being the first to issue a breach of the EU’s new rules.
