Google is struggling to defend itself against another threat from the US Department of Justice seeking a possible breakup of the company over monopolistic conduct in technology that presents online advertising to consumers.
The Justice Department and Google are expected to make their closing arguments Monday in the trial accusing Google’s advertising tech of a violation of antitrust law.
This was a trial presided over by the US District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria Virginia, and the judge has reserved her judgment in the case and writing a decision in by December later this year. If Google has indeed participated in some unlawful monopolistic activities, Brinkema is to schedule other hearings to discover the appropriate sanctions she is to inflict.
The Justice Department along with states have already stated it is the view that Google must sell ad tech, a business that is believed to earn Google tens of billions of dollars annually and is based in Mountain View, California.
As it was established during the trial testimony that was filed early this year, the arguments are the same.
According to the Justice Department, Google developed and ran a monopoly in open-web display advertising, which is the rectangular form of ads that one finds at the top and right corner when browsing websites.
Google dominates all facets of the market: News sites and most other online publishers employ a technology known as DoubleClick while Google Ads retains a list of advertisers both big and small ready to place their ads on the right webpage in front of the right consumer.
Between them is another google product AdExchange that conducts near real-time auctions to match the advertiser to the publisher.
In filings in the case, Justice Department lawyers say Google is a monopoly that cares more about its ‘‘Holy Trinity’’ of monopolies and not for its own publisher/advertiser clients in the litigation nor about the merits of the case.
Hence, content providers and news organisations have never been able to earn the online revenues that they needed due retain for brokering advertisement sale between advertisers and publishers, the government argues.
Google counters Shade has grown the government’s case which only concerns a narrow niche of online advertising. If one looks a little broader and considers social media, streaming TV services, and app-based advertising, Google told the world that it’s actually only responsible today for 25% of online ads, a figure that is steadily declining as the company is challenged by new and more diverse competition.
Google italicised in the court papers that the government suit is based on continuous, nuisance grievances of several of Google’s competitors and several titan publishers.
Google also told the court that it spends billions of dollars on technology that helps it to efficiently lead people who want to buy commodities that are relevant to advertisements and that it should not be compelled to share technology and success with those who are its rivals.
No company could have been required to do further engineering work to make its technology and customers equally accessible to all its competitors on the latter’s terms, as has been compelled by US antitrust law, the company added.
That suit is different from another lawsuit currently being prosecuted against Google in the District of Columbia over the search engine named Google. In that case, the judge concluded that the search engine had created an unreasonable monopoly but had not decided when to apply the prohibition.
The Justice Department stated last week it will try to force Google to divest itself of the Chrome Web browser amid other penalties. Google has described the department’s request as something as dramatic as overkill and far from any semblance of regulation.
