The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced a settlement with three major ad companies over claims that they colluded to implement a “brand safety” measure through which “disfavored content,” including conservative media outlets, was effectively boycotted and deemed misinformation, and fewer ads were run. The ad agencies have agreed to an order stopping such conduct. 

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a statement, “The ad agencies’ brand-safety conspiracy turned competition in the market for ad-buying services on its head. The antitrust laws guarantee participation in a market free from conduct, such as economic boycotts, that distort the fundamental competitive pressures that promote lower prices, higher quality products and increased innovation.”

“As we explain in our complaint, the brand-safety agreement limited competition in the market for ad-buying services and deprived advertisers of the benefits of differentiated brand-safety standards that could be tailored to their unique advertising inventory,” he continued. “This unlawful collusion not only damaged our marketplace, but also distorted the marketplace of ideas by discriminating against speech and ideas that fell below the unlawfully agreed-upon floor. The proposed order remedies the dangers inherent to collusive practices and restores competition to the digital news ecosystem.”

In a complaint filed alongside several other states, the FTC said that major ad agencies WPP, Publicis, and Dentsu operated through their trade associations Federation of Advertisers’ Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) and the Association of Advertising Agencies’ Advertiser Protection Bureau (APB) to establish a “Brand Safety Floor” that targets “misinformation.”

“The Brand Safety Floor resulted in reduced ad revenues for many conservative publishers; sites that fell below the Brand Safety Floor were at risk of being passed over as ad agencies looked to spend billions of dollars to buy ad inventory on behalf of their advertiser clients,” the complaint stated. 

The complaint stated that the agreement “insulated the ad agencies from the competitive pressures that would otherwise have existed for them to improve and differentiate their brand-safety offerings with the goal of capturing business from each other. It harmed advertisers because they lost the benefits of that competition, including better quality and lower cost brand-safety tools, and the broader reach, better targeting, and cheaper inventory that those tools would have provided in the absence of the agencies’ agreement. And, ultimately, by demonetizing certain conservative media outlets, the agreement hampered debate on some of the most consequential and hotly debated subjects of public life.”