It’s hard to disagree that Google is the dominant force in advertising. It makes most of its money by serving ads, which you’ve probably seen all over the Internet. However, despite the growing antitrust sentiment surrounding the company, it would still require a massive effort on the part of businesses and regulators to combat such dominance. Well, it seems like the biggest telecom companies in Europe are willing to try it.
According to Reuters, Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), Telefónica (Movistar, O2), Vodafone (UK), and Orange (France) have announced that they will launch a joint advertising venture. A supervisory board has been established, whose members have been selected by the shareholders, and each of the four groups will have an equal share in the new holding company, which will be managed independently.
The conglomerate intends to launch an advertising platform for European users that is built from the ground up to be compliant with the stringent online privacy policies of the European Union, such as the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive, according to a joint statement from the venture’s participants.
The advertising platform that the joint venture will use was developed by Vodafone. Over the course of the past year, Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone conducted testing on the platform in Germany, and Orange and Telefonica are planning to conduct testing in their home markets of France and Spain.
Users are required to opt-in to receiving communications from brands through publishers, and they are able to give or revoke consent at any time through a handy privacy portal. These key features allow users to take control of how they see advertisements. Additionally, this platform does not share anything other than a “pseudo-anonymous digital token that cannot be reverse-engineered,” which is something Google has struggled with when developing a tracking cookie replacement.
We don’t know everything there is to know about this technology, but it sounds like it might make Google and other advertisers in Big Tech like Meta a little nervous, at least in Europe.
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