The formidable German cartel office or Bundeskartellamt, effectively the competition regulator, has begun a “sector enquiry” into online advertising. It is worried about the way online advertising is being manipulated by large US multinational internet businesses, like Google and Facebook, and how this may lead to more advertising fraud, create less brand safe ad spaces and create an environment where data about advertising is held in proprietary databases, not open to be widely viewed by all the industry participants. Andreas Mundt, President of the Bundeskartellamt said when he launched the initiative, “Online advertising has experienced an extraordinarily high rate of growth in the last 20 years. The market volume in Germany alone is estimated at over €5 billion. Due to…