One month after a judge declared Google’s search engine an illegal monopoly, the tech giant faces another antitrust lawsuit that threatens to break up the company, this time over its advertising technology.
Both the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), joined by a coalition of states, and Google made opening statements on Monday to a federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, who will decide whether Google holds a monopoly over online advertising technology.
The regulators contend that Google built, acquired and maintains a monopoly over the technology that matches online publishers to advertisers. Dominance over the software on both the buy side and the sell side of the transaction enables Google to keep as much as 36 cents on the dollar when it brokers sales between publishers and advertisers, the government contended.
They alleged that Google also controls the ad exchange market, which matches ad buyers to ad sellers.
“One monopoly is bad enough. But a trifecta of monopolies is what we have here,” DOJ lawyer Julia Tarver Wood said during her opening statement.
Google said the government’s case is based on an internet of yesteryear when desktop computers ruled and internet users carefully typed precise world wide web addresses into URL fields. Advertisers now are more likely to turn to social media companies like TikTok or streaming TV services like Peacock, it contended.
In her opening statement, Google lawyer Karen Dunn likened the government’s case to a…
