A US judge has determined that Google maintains an illegal monopoly in online advertising technology, marking the tech giant’s second antitrust loss within a year.
The lawsuit, brought by the US Department of Justice and 17 states, successfully argued that Google illegally dominates the technology determining online ad placement. This ruling follows an earlier decision that found Google also held a monopoly in online search.
Google has announced plans to appeal the decision. “Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective,” stated Lee-Ann Mulholland, Google’s head of regulatory affairs.
In her ruling, US District Judge Leonie Brinkema declared Google had “wilfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts” allowing it to “acquire and maintain monopoly power” in the market. “This exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web,” she wrote.
The court ruled against Google on two counts while dismissing a third. “We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half,” Mulholland said. “The Court found that our advertiser tools and our acquisitions, such as DoubleClick, don’t harm competition.”
Google’s defense had argued the case overly emphasized past activities while ignoring other major ad tech providers like Amazon.
Jason Kint, head of Digital Content Next, a trade association representing online publishers, criticized Google for using “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.”
Google maintains significant control across the online advertising ecosystem, owning major entities on both buyer and seller sides, as well as the ad exchange connecting them.
According to Anupam Chander, professor of law and technology at Georgetown University, internet users won’t notice immediate differences online due to this ruling. However, it affects “the division of monies between advertisers, publishers, and ad service providers.” He added that the judge appears “willing to order structural changes in Google’s ad exchange practices, which may affect Google’s bottom line somewhat, but don’t seem to necessarily threaten its core value proposition as an advertising middleman.”
In ongoing antitrust litigation, the US government argues that Google and parent company Alphabet should be broken up, potentially including divestiture of assets like the Chrome browser.
Meanwhile, in September, the UK’s competition watchdog provisionally determined that Google was employing anti-competitive practices to dominate the online advertising technology market.
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