Sundar PichaiCEO of Google, and Mark ZuckerbergMeta's CEO, have been accused of personally approving a secret advertising deal that would grant Facebook special privileges on Google's advertising platform.
This new scandal involving the tech giants comes to light from an antitrust complaint filed by a coalition of U.S. states led by Texas. The lawsuit was filed in new version to a New York court this Friday, 14, after being initially launched against Google in December 2020. The plaintiffs allege that the company allegedly manipulated its ad auction mechanism to favor Facebook. Google also allegedly offered optimized data to Facebook to allow it a greater analytics advantage. The agreement would have been signed in September 2018 by Philipp Schindler, vice president and head of sales and operations of Google's advertising arm, and Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer and board member of Facebook, who previously led advertising at Google.
The illegal partnership between the two fiercest competitors in the digital advertising market would have been called Blue Jedi by Google, in reference to Star Wars.
According to the accusations, the deal was a maneuver by Google to counteract the leadership that Facebook had been assuming in digital advertising outside its social networks. Google offered Facebook priority in the purchase and appearance of its advertising space across the Internet, in exchange for the social network abandoning its plans to create its own digital ad system.
Big tech in the crosshairs of antitrust efforts
The complaint comes to light as both Google and Meta, as well as Amazon and Apple, face repression and harsh criticism for their business practices. Authorities, regulators and activists in several countries have denounced that the practices of large technology corporations inhibit competition and are fighting to try to diminish the immense power they have achieved. Globally, for years online advertising has been highly concentrated by Facebook and Google, which in 2020 cornered more than 50 percent of this market in the United States.
When on October 4, 2021 the Meta platforms ? Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram ? went down for a few hours all at once, cutting off the digital communications of millions of people in Europe, America and Asia, the impact of this monopoly on everyday life became evident. With approximately 2.89 billion monthly active users, Facebook tops the list of the most used social networks in the world, followed by Google's YouTube, and then its other platforms: WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger. During the first quarter of 2021, the company claimed that 3510 million people used at least one of its core products (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger) every month.
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