The United States Department of Justice has won an antitrust action against Google, accusing the corporation of maintaining a monopoly in the advertising technology business.
The verdict, which is Google’s most recent antitrust loss since the Search case, states that the tech giant’s anticompetitive actions “substantially harmed” publisher clients and online users.
“Plaintiffs have proven that Google has willfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts to acquire and maintain monopoly power in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets for open-web display advertising,” according to US District Judge Leonie Brinkema. “For over a decade, Google has tied its publisher ad server and ad exchange together through contractual policies and technological integration, which enabled the company to establish and protect its monopoly power in these two markets.”
Over the course of three weeks, the DOJ said that Google unjustly monopolized three distinct ad tech markets: publisher ad tools, advertiser ad networks, and ad exchanges that facilitate transactions. They also claimed that Google illegally linked their publisher ad server and ad exchange, in violation of antitrust laws. According to the government, the result is that Google gains from its monopoly at the expense of publishers and advertisers, who have a worse experience due to the lack of viable alternatives.
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Google, on the other hand, claimed that the government’s entire concept of the market was artificial and not grounded in reality. Google’s technologies help publishers and advertisers make money, and the fact that it has tools in diverse sections of the market allows them to collaborate effectively for the benefit of consumers, they said. Google has legitimate commercial reasons for its behavior, and the government just wants to dictate how it can conduct business, they contended.
The judgment comes as Google and the DOJ prepare to meet in another federal court across the river in Washington, DC, for the remedies phase of the search trial. In that case, the Biden administration’s DOJ advocated breaking up Google by spinning off its Chrome browser and forcing it to syndicate search results.
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