EU regulators investigating Google’s digital ad business

The European Commission announced Tuesday that it has opened an antitrust investigation into Google’s ad business.

The regulator will focus on whether the search giant favors its own ad tech services “to the detriment of competing providers of advertising technology services, advertisers and online publishers.”

It will also investigate whether Google is hurting competition by restricting third-party access to user data that it uses itself.

“Online advertising services are at the heart of how Google and publishers monetise their online services,” Europe’s antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.

Europe’s top court ruled Tuesday that platforms are not liable for copyright violations on content uploaded by third parties unless the companies fail to take sufficient action.

The decision came in a combined cases against YouTube by music producer Frank Peterson and against file-hosting company Cynado by publisher Elsevier.

The court concluded that “online platforms do not themselves make a communication to the public of copyright-protected content illegally posted online by users of those platforms unless those operators contribute, beyond merely making those platforms available, to giving access to such content to the public in breach of copyright.”