Canada’s Competition Bureau has filed a lawsuit against Alphabet-owned Google, accusing the tech giant of engaging in anti-competitive practices in the online advertising market. According to a report by Reuters, the Canadian antitrust watchdog said that it has filed an application with the Competition Tribunal seeking an order that requires Google to sell two of its ad tech tools.

The report also mentioned that the Competition Bureau is also seeking a penalty from Google to promote compliance with Canada’s competition laws.

The Canadian antitrust watchdog opened an investigation in 2020 to probe whether the search engine giant had engaged in practices that harm competition in the online ads industry and expanded the probe to include Google’s advertising technology services earlier this year.

The investigation found that Google is the largest provider across the ad tech stack for web advertising in Canada and it has abused its dominant position through conduct intended to ensure that it would maintain and entrench its market power.

Google said the complaint ignores the intense competition where ad buyers and sellers have plenty of choice and ‘we look forward to making our case in court’.

“Our advertising technology tools help websites and apps fund their content, and enable businesses of all sizes to effectively reach new customers,” Dan Taylor, VP of Global Ads, Google was quoted as saying by Reuters.

The case comes after the US Justice Department tried to prove that Google has monopolised the markets for publisher ad servers and advertiser ad networks.

Google argues that the US government is overlooking the company’s legitimate business choices and that the online ad market is highly competitive. The tech giant also claims that the US government has focused on only a small part of the online market and ignored the strong competition.

Earlier this year, the search giant offered to sell the ad exchange to end an EU antitrust investigation but European publishers rejected the proposal as insufficient.

(With inputs from Reuters)