American company Google has announced that it will no longer show political ads to users in the European Union (EU) next year. The company cites the EU’s new transparency rules as the reason for this. Google says these created uncertainties in a new blog post“The upcoming EU Regulation on Transparency and Targeting in Political Advertising (TTPA) unfortunately brings significant new operational challenges and legal uncertainties for political advertisers and platforms,” the company writes.
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The new EU regulation adopted this spring on transparency and targeting of political advertising aims to prevent election interference and help voters make an informed choice. In future, EU citizens should be able to better identify political advertising. However, this was not enough to lead to a blanket ban on interest-based political advertising at the EU level.
Google, on the other hand, considers the definition of political advertising in the regulation to be too broad. This makes it difficult to reliably determine which advertisements should be banned in connection with local, regional or national elections in the 27 EU Member States and to what extent. According to the announcement, the search engine company will stop running political ads in the EU before the regulation comes into effect in October 2025. In addition, paid political advertising, provided it is considered political advertising within the meaning of the Regulation, will no longer be allowed on YouTube in the EU. The decision will be examined further and more details regarding the exact timing will be announced next year.
Google has previously stopped running political ads in countries such as France, Canada and Brazil due to similar problems with “specific implementation” of the rules in place there. The American company is in conflict with the European Union in other areas as well. Just yesterday, in a dispute over EU copyright law, Google announced it would remove news from European publishers from its search results as a test. The purpose of the test is to show publishers (and EU regulators) how much traffic they would lose without Google.
(AKN)
