“Having inserted itself into all aspects of the digital advertising marketplace, Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies,” the lawsuit states.
Google returned to federal court on Monday to face allegations that it manipulated the online advertising market.
According to FOX Business, Google is defending claims brought by the federal Department of Justice. In its lawsuit, the Justice Department alleges that Google leverages its advertising technology services to set favorable prices and suppress almost all of its competition.
“Competition in the ad tech space is broken, for reasons that were neither accidental nor inevitable,” the Department of Justice wrote in its complaint. “One industry behemoth, Google, has corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising.”
Google’s purportedly monopolistic practices, the government says, have raised advertising rates for customers across the country.
“Having inserted itself into all aspects of the digital advertising marketplace, Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies,” the lawsuit states.
FOX Business notes that the case is moving to trial less than a month after another judge ruled that Google likely created a monopoly in the separate “search engine” industry. Google’s practices allegedly made it borderline impossible for competitors—including DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Yelp—to seize or attract any sizeable portion of Google’s customer base.
Google, for its part, simply insists that it has created a much better product than any of its competitors. Its attorneys are expected to make similar arguments in the ad-tech trial.
But, in court filings, the Department of Justice argues that Google continues to “force key competitors to abandon the market for ad-tech tools, dissuaded potential competitors from joining the market, and left Google’s few remaining competitors marginalized and unfairly disadvantaged.”
Google has characterized these arguments as indicative of a “backward-looking case” that is “out of touch with reality.”
Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, said in a recent blog post that the Department of Justice appears to be “picking winners and losers in a highly competitive industry.”
“With the cost of ads going down and the number of ads sold going up, the market is working,” Mulholland wrote. “The DOJ’s case risks inefficiencies and higher prices—the last thing that America’s economy or our small businesses need right now.”
The trial is being held in Alexandria, Virginia, and is expected to last for a prolonged period of time.
Sources
Google faces another DOJ antitrust lawsuit over alleged ad-tech monopoly
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