US Judge Rules Google Has Illegal Online Advertising Monopoly

US Judge Rules Google Has Illegal Online Advertising Monopoly

Google’s legal team had contended that the case overly focused on past activities and overlooked other significant ad tech providers such as Amazon.

RMN News Report

A US judge has ruled that the tech giant Google holds an illegal monopoly in the online advertising technology market. The ruling comes after a lawsuit filed by the US Department of Justice and 17 US states, who argued that Google was unlawfully dominating the technology used to determine which online advertisements are placed and where. This marks the second antitrust defeat for Google in the past year, following a previous ruling that the company also held a monopoly in online search.

According to a BBC report of April 18, Google has stated its intention to appeal the decision. Lee-Ann Mulholland, the firm’s head of regulatory affairs, argued that “Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective”.

However, US district judge Leonie Brinkema stated in her ruling that Google had “wilfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts” that allowed it to “acquire and maintain monopoly power” within the market. She further noted that this “exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web”.

The ruling saw Google lose on two counts, while a third was dismissed, BBC added in its report. Ms Mulholland commented, “We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half,” adding that “The court found that our advertiser tools and our acquisitions, such as DoubleClick, don’t harm competition”.

Google’s legal team had contended that the case overly focused on past activities and overlooked other significant ad tech providers such as Amazon. Jason Kint, head of Digital Content Next, a trade association representing online publishers, stated in the BBC report that “Google has repeatedly used its market power to self-preference its own products, stifling innovation and depriving premium publishers worldwide of critical revenue needed to sustain high-quality journalism and entertainment”.

The US government is reportedly involved in ongoing antitrust lawsuits arguing that Google and its parent company Alphabet should be broken up, potentially including the sale of parts like the Chrome browser. In September, according to BBC, the UK’s competition watchdog also provisionally concluded that Google was employing anti-competitive practices to dominate the online advertising technology market.