The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority, a non-ministerial government organization responsible for creating healthy business competition, has reportedly raised concerns regarding the market strength of technology giants Facebook and Google.

The agency published these concerns from an interim report. It has opened up a consultation on a series of potential inventions; from dividing technology giants to reducing their abilities to enforcing data sharing or/and feature interoperability and set self-serving defaults, to help their rivals compete.

CMA is looking to divide Google by compelling it to decouple its ad server department from the rest of its business. This move is one of the several possible interventions the agency is eyeing. The agency is also looking to enforce choice screens on browsers and search engines that utilize non-monetary criteria to assign slots.

These obligations of CMA are versus the company’s plan of pay-to-play offering for EU Android users. Rivals argue that this offering of the company does not provide the relief for antitrust abuse that was sanctioned by the European Commission last year.

The regulatory agency is also seeing if it should need Facebook to interoperate certain features of its present network so they would be accessed by its rivals. The agency is considering this as a solution for what it is describing as strong network effects that tend to work against novel entrant and rival social media platforms.

CMA unveiled the market study in July 2019, two weeks after the British data watchdog released its damning report. This report set out major privacy as well as other concerns that revolve around programmatic advertising.

Since the start of this study, the CMA states that it has received many requests to start a full-blown market investigation. This means that the agency has carry out a statutory duty that compels it to consult over making such a reference.

The report particularly flags three areas and it considers possible harm; the open display advertising market, general search and search advertising and social media and display advertising.

Source credit: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/18/uks-competition-regulator-asks-for-views-on-breaking-up-google/