Google was branded for the second time in less than a year by a federal judge. This time, this time, because he illegally exploited part of his online advertising technology to increase profit and strengthen an internet empire worth 1.8 trillion US dollars.
The US district judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, decided that Google illegally monopolized the markets for publisher advertising violations and the market for advertising wages that lie between buyers and sellers. Cartel improvements have not proven that the company had a monopoly in advertising networks, she wrote.
“For over a decade, Google has connected its publisher -ad server and the AD exchange through contractual guidelines and technological integration, which made it possible for the company to establish and protect its monopoly power in these two markets.” Brinkema wrote. “Google continued to anchor its monopoly power by imposing their customers in contrast to competitive guidelines and eliminating desirable product features.”
The decision follows a separate decision in August 2024, which came to the conclusion,
Although both times the antitrust authorities prevailed, the fight is likely to last a few years, since Google is trying to lift the two monopoly decisions in the appeals and at the same time to come in the new and highly lucrative technological limit of artificial intelligence.
The next step in the last case is a criminal phase that will probably begin at the end of this year or early next year.
In a statement, Google said that the judgment would appeal.
“We do not agree with the court’s decision about our publishing tool,” said Lee-Anne Mulholland, Vice President of Google of regulatory matters. “Publishers have many options and choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective.”
Non -partisan concerns
After the US Justice Ministry had passed Google’s ubiquitous search engine during the first administration of President Donald Trump, the same agency left the lucrative digital advertising network in 2023, when Joe Biden was president, to undertake the power that Google has been in a Silicon Valley garage in 1998.
Brinkemas 115-page decision-making officers on the marketing device that Google has spent over the past 17 years to build its search engine and other widespread products and services, including the Chrome browser, the YouTube video tape and digital maps.
The system is largely based on a number of acquisitions that started with Google’s 3.2 billion US dollars from online advertising specialists in 2008. At that time, the US supervisory authorities approved the shops before they realized that they had the mountain view, California, a platform for manipulation of prices in an ecosystem that depends on a wide range of websites.
The lawyers of the Ministry of Justice argued that Google had built and maintained dominant market positions in a technology trifecta used by website publishers to sell advertising space on their websites, as well as the technology with which advertisers receive their advertisers in front of the consumers, and the AD exchanges that carry out automatic auctions in breaks of a second.
As in the case of Search Monopoly, Google and its company Alphabet vehemently rejected the allegations of the Ministry of Justice. Her lawyers argued that the government was largely based on an outdated concept of a market that existed a decade ago and at the same time underestimated a competitive market for advertising editions, which comprises Facebook parents -Meta platforms, Amazon, Microsoft and Comcast.
The market, which was drawn in the case of the Ministry of Justice, did not contain any advertisements that appear in mobile apps, streaming television services or other platforms, on which Internet users are increasingly migrated, and prompted Google lawyer Karen Dunn to compare the government’s definition. A time capsule with a Blackberry, an iPod and a blockbuster video card “during their opening instructions when the attempt began in September.
Google back to court next week
In the case of court proceedings, the lawyers of the Ministry of Justice emphasized the damage to news publishers, which was made from Google’s alleged dominance of the market.
Witnesses of Gannett, the editor of USA Today and other newspapers, and News Corp., the publisher of Wall Street Journal, said about the difficulties with which they were confronted and what they said was a lack of alternatives to Google’s advertising -tech. These companies rely on online advertising to finance their news companies and to free their articles free to consumers on the Internet, as state lawyers argued.
Now the government is able to reduce this Byzantine ad system. When the case was submitted more than two years ago during the Biden administration, the Ministry of Justice stated at least its AD -Manager product, which includes the technology that is used by website publisher and the AD exchange.
In the meantime, so-called “remedial measures” lists in the case of the Search Monopoly on Monday in Washington DC, where lawyers from the Ministry of Justice will try to convince the US district judge Amit Mehta to impose a comprehensive punishment that contains a proposed requirement to sell its Chrome-Webbrowser.
