Google investigated by UK watchdog over search dominance
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CMA to look at impact on consumers, businesses, advertisers and publishers, as well as collection of data. Google is being investigated by the UK competition watchdog over the impact of its search and advertising practices on consumers, news publishers, businesses and rival search engines.
The tech company accounts for more than 90% of general searches in the UK, according to the Competition and Markets Authority. The CMA announced on Tuesday it will investigate if Google is blocking competitors from entering the market, and whether it is engaging in “potential exploitative conduct” by the mass collection of consumers’ data without informed consent.
It will also investigate whether Google is using its position as the pre-eminent search engine to give an unfair advantage to its own shopping and travel services. The investigation will take up to nine months and could result in Google being forced to share the mountains of data it collects with other businesses, or to give publishers greater control over how their content – books, newspaper articles and music – is used, including by Google’s fast-growing artificial intelligence systems.
The investigation is the first launched by the watchdog since a new digital markets competition regime came into force in the UK on 1 January 2025, allowing the UK authorities to issue “conduct requirements” to technology companies. There is increasing anti-regulation pressure from the US before Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday. Last week, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Meta, attacked European nations for “an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative”. He promised to “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies”.
