The European Union and the U.K. are ramping up their parallel crackdowns on big tech companies, opening formal antitrust investigations into whether
Alphabet Inc.’s
Google and
owner Meta Platforms Inc. sought to illegally fix prices in digital advertising.
The European Commission, the EU’s top antitrust enforcer, and the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority said Friday they are each investigating a once-secret 2018 deal, known as Jedi Blue, that emerged as part of a lawsuit brought a year and a half ago by a group of U.S. states led by Texas.
The Texas lawsuit argues that Google gave Meta special terms and access to its ad server, a ubiquitous tool for allocating advertising space across the…
