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A federal judge in the US has determined that Google illegally acquired and maintained its digital advertising monopoly. This is the latest antitrust defeat against the tech giant, and as a result, they have to sell a portion of their business.
Leonie Brinkema, district judge who presides over the Virginia case, said Thursday that Google “deliberately” monopolized two parts of the digital advertising market. The technology used by online publishers to sell advertising spaces and the biggest exchange where advertising is a company bids.
However, Brinkema discovered that the US Department of Justice, which led to the incident, cannot prove that Google has unfairly controlled the third element of the market, advertisers’ ad networks.
The ruling came last year when another federal judge in an antitrust case discovered that Google spent billions of dollars on exclusive transactions to maintain its illegal monopoly in searches.
The second phase of that trial, in which the court decides a relief package, including enforcing a portion of Google’s business, begins next week.
In a search case, DOJ asked Google to sell Chrome browsers, stop paying $200 billion each year to make it the default search engine, and share more data with its rivals.
In his ruling on Thursday, Brinkema wrote: “For over a decade, Google has been linking publisher ad servers with ad exchanges through contractual policies and technology integration.
“Google has further cemented its monopoly by imposing anti-competitive policies on its customers and removing desirable product features,” she added.
However, she rejected the way DOJ tried to define part 3 of the market, and the term “advertiser ad network” is rare in the industry and “overly excluded”[s]Publisher.
Google said: “We’ll win half of this case and sue the other half. We’re against the court’s decision on publisher tools. We’ll choose Google because publishers have many options and advertising technology tools are simple, affordable and effective.”
The ruling is the latest victory for a former antitrust official appointed by Joe Biden, who filed the lawsuit before Donald Trump returned to the White House.
Jonathan Canter, former head of DOJ’s antitrust unit, said in a post on X on Thursday:
Anti-trust officials appointed by Trump are strongly known to intend to adopt a strict enforcement stance, particularly against Big Technology. This week, the US Federal Trade Commission began suing Meta in an exclusive trial in Washington federal court.
The DOJ did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
