Google’s proposed antitrust remedies to the European Commission fall significantly short of the structural sell-off that regulators in both Europe and the United States had considered to address competition concerns in the online advertising market.
The proposals, which focus on behavioral adjustments, closely mirror those Google offered in a U.S. federal ad tech case initiated by the Trump administration.
With closing arguments in the U.S. trial set to begin Monday, any forced breakup of the company is more likely to originate there. According to legal experts, the European Commission has never imposed such a structural remedy and faces a high legal threshold to do so.
However, critics argue that behavioral commitments consisting of technical tweaks are insufficient. “The only credible solution is a forced divestment of part of Google’s advertising business—anything else is just window dressing,” said Max von Thun of the Open Markets Institute.
“In the case of Google, behavioural remedies have always failed,” he added, pointing to the widely ineffective measures imposed by the Commission in its 2017 Google Shopping decision.
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