Canada’s Competition Bureau is closing its anti-competition probe of Google Inc.’s online business practices and says with one exception it did not find evidence of abusive practices in “online search, search advertising and display advertising services in Canada.”

The Bureau launched the probe in 2013 on allegations that since 2005 Google had used its dominant position in search traffic to engage in anti-competitive practices. The formal probe began with the Bureau alleging “the manner in which Google operates its search engine and search advertising platforms … amount to an abuse of a dominant position.”

The report, issued Tuesday at noon ET, says the Bureau “did not find sufficient evidence of a substantial lessening or prevention of competition in the market to support the other allegations” with the exception of a practice that limited a user’s ability to connect Google’s AdWords product to a competitor’s ad network software. Google abandoned that practice in 2013, after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission issued a report with a similar warning for the company.

“Should new evidence come to light of anti-competitive conduct that may affect the Canadian marketplace, by Google or any other market participant, I won’t hesitate to take appropriate action," Commissioner of Competition John Pecman said in a statement.

Google’s response was a statement it attributed to Kent Walker, a Senior Vice President and General Counsel for Google Inc. and Alphabet Inc.: “We’re pleased that the Canadian Competition Bureau has decided to end its inquiry. We work hard in a competitive landscape to create a great experience for our users and help them quickly and easily find what they need from Google.” Alphabet Inc., is the holding company that owns Google Inc. and its Canadian subsidiary.

Google owns almost 90 per cent of the search ad market in Canada, perhaps closer to 95 per cent in Europe. In the United States, it has about 70 per cent of that market.

In some ways the potency of the arguments against Google’s search-ad dominance have been eroded by the growth in mobile and social advertising since 2013. According to Emarketer, global mobile Internet ad revenues soared from $40-billion to $70-billion from 2014-2015, but search ad revenue (the main area of interest to the competition bureau) made up only $8.7-billion in 2014 and $14-billion in 2015.

As the Bureau’s investigation went along, Google’s share of the global mobile ad market fell from 40 per cent to 34.5 per cent from 2014 to 2015, even as revenues grew from $16-billion to $24-billion (it’s biggest rival Facebook saw its share remain flat at about 18 per cent even as revenues grew from $7.4-billion to $13-billion). Emarketer’s projections show that while Google makes Android, the largest smartphone operating system, new players like Alibaba and Tencent will increasingly eat into its global ad marketshare on mobile.

Canada’s investigation has been running in parallel to a European Union probe, which according to Reuters reports is nearing its conclusion and has begun to centre on the influence the company wields thanks to its widely used open-source Android mobile operating system.

“Our concern is that by requiring phone makers and operators to pre-load a set of Google apps, rather than letting them decide for themselves which apps to load, Google might have cut off one of the main ways that new apps can reach customers,” the European Union’s Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, a Danish politician appointed in 2014, said at a regulatory conference in Amsterdam.

If the EU were to issue fines related to market abuse it could cost Google 10 per cent of its 2015 revenue, or about $7.4-billion.

Google has faced competition probes going back to 2007, when the FTC looked into its DoubleClick ad network. More recently it has faced investigations and in some cases findings of abuse by competition regulators in South Korea, India and Russia.

With reports from Reuters