Ad executives point to five ways Google stifles business

US authorities investigating Alphabet Inc’s Google for anticompetitive behaviour have recently begun probing the company’s $116 billion-a-year advertising business.

Attorneys general for 50 US states and territories along with the US Department of Justice appear to be acting on accusations from rivals, lawmakers and consumer advocacy groups that the biggest seller of online ads engages in unfair tactics. Google disputes its dominance.

“Ad tech is a very crowded field, and Google competes with hundreds of companies, including household names like Adobe, Amazon, AT&T, Comcast, News Corp and Verizon,” company spokesman Josh Zeitz said.

“Publishers and advertisers mix and match technology partners to meet their different needs, creating both competition and innovation.” Later, in response to this story, Google reiterated in a blog post here that its services foster competition.

“Our tools and platforms make it easy for advertisers and publishers of all sizes to choose whom they want to work with in this open, interconnected ad system,” Google Vice President Sissie Hsiao wrote. Here are five common concerns about Google raised by 10 ad industry executives, most speaking on the condition of anonymity.

About 80 percent of Google’s ad revenue and most of its profits come from ads within Google search results, YouTube, Gmail and other internet services the company owns. Rivals say that Google controls these properties in a way that hinders advertising competition.

For instance, the only technology system for buying ads on YouTube, the world’s largest video streaming website, is Google’s ad buying tool. Services such as Facebook Inc (FB.O) maintain similar control, in part to limit too widely sharing users’ data. But as YouTube increasingly dominates online video, rival tools for placing ads in video streams become less attractive to advertisers because they can only access smaller audiences.