NGOs protested outside the European Commission’s antitrust directorate Wednesday to urge Brussels to break up Alphabet, Google’s parent company, and end its digital advertising monopoly.

Armed with two separate petitions reportedly signed by a combined 116,000 European citizens, a small group representing the coordinating NGOs — LobbyControl, Rebalance Now, WeMove, and People vs. Big Tech — gathered shortly before 10:30 a.m. at the front entrance of DG Competition’s Madou headquarters.

“Google’s monopoly abuses its market power and undermines democracy on the internet,” said Max Bank, a campaigner from Germany-based LobbyControl. “Google is too powerful.”

Before a sole security guard and with an accompanying photographer, they unfurled a banner declaring “Break Up Big Tech,” staging a brief, focused protest ahead of their formal meeting to present the petitions that afternoon.

Bank confirmed the official handover of the signatures stemming from two separate petitions specifically targeting Google and the ad-tech industry, one launched by LobbyControl and one by WeMove and AlgorithmWatch. Both petitions ask the Commission to divide up parts of Google’s adtech business, citing its impact on challenging the business model of traditional publishers.

The groups, led in part by LobbyControl, are looking to put pressure on the European Commission to reach a decision on its investigation into Google’s dominance of the advertising tech market.

The EU executive has had Google’s control of the digital advertising market in its crosshairs for several years. In 2023, the Commission sent them a formal charge for breaking the bloc’s antitrust rules, with then-competition chief Margrethe Vestager saying that offloading one part of its business could be “the only way to solve this.”

The Commission’s investigation is ongoing.

The petition also comes amid increasing international pressure after the U.S. Department of Justice in May called on Google to separate its search and advertising businesses, just a few weeks after a landmark U.S. judgment found it had illegally maintained its adtech monopoly.

In a statement, the organizations argued that the European Commission, which has previously found Google to be abusing its monopoly position, now has a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to dismantle Google’s advertising monopoly.”

“The EU is able to do something,” LobbyControl’s Bank said, adding that the groups would deliver that message in a meeting with the competition directorate later that day.

The Cologne-based lobbying watchdog has targeted the tech sector in recent years due to its perceived power over information dissemination.

A spokesperson for Google declined to comment beyond referring POLITICO to a blog post that lays out the company’s argument against the need for regulatory scrutiny of the “fiercely competitive” digital advertising sector.

A European Commission spokesperson said: “As always, we stand ready to hear the views of civil society groups and consumers. We continue our investigation in the Google Adtech case as a matter of priority.”