Just As Expected: GDPR Has Made Google Even More Dominant In Europe

Oh, the EU, will you ever learn? Over the last few years, the EU has been screaming about the awfulness of evil large tech companies in the name of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple (sometimes called "GAFA"), though in reality, their biggest concerns are focused almost entirely on Google and Facebook. The EU keeps popping up with ridiculous laws, all of which are designed to hit Google and Facebook. The GDPR was a big one, and the latest is the EU Copyright Directive. And there are more as well. Some of us keep pointing out to the EU that if these laws are designed to go after Google and Facebook, they're going to miss their target quite a bit, because they'll mostly serve to lock in those companies as the dominant providers. That's because they're big enough to manage the regulatory burden, whereas startups and smaller competitors will not be able to and will suffer.

The first bit of data is in on the GDPR and of course it shows that the big winner under the GDPR is... Google. The biggest losers? Smaller competitors to Google. A bit surprisingly, Facebook did see its adtech marketshare decline (while Google's grew), but relative to everyone else, Facebook sill beat out all other competitors.

Now, the report does note that there are fewer ad trackers for users in the EU -- which is certainly a win for users -- but the fact that this is further cementing the dominant position of Google and Facebook should be a massive concern to people who value competitive markets and innovation.

This shouldn't be a surprising result at all. But if part of the goal of the EU is to reduce the reliance on Google and Facebook, the exact opposite is occurring. Just like lots of us predicted.