The agency is investigating whether the company’s 2016 policy change to prevent third-party firms from accessing and selling inventory on the platform prevented or lessened competition. Friday’s order requires Google to turn over relevant documents, the Competition Bureau said in a release. “We will continue to engage constructively with the Canadian Competition Bureau to answer their questions and demonstrate the benefits of our products to Canadian businesses and consumers,” said Google spokesperson Molly Morgan. (The Logic)

Talking point: While its investigation similarly focuses on competition in the online display-advertising market, it’s different and, given the relative size of YouTube and search revenue to the company’s bottom line, narrower in scope than the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust case against Google, filed in October 2020. While the bureau emphasizes it’s made no finding of wrongdoing yet, any such conclusion would carry a maximum fine in the millions—not billions, as the EU has imposed—of dollars. In a speech Monday, competition commissioner Matthew Boswell acknowledged concerns from policy experts that the penalties his agency can seek under the law “don’t meaningfully deter anti-competitive conduct or promote compliance” among large digital platforms, but are “merely the cost of doing business.”