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The U.S. Department of Justice and eight states have sued Google, over allegations it has an abusive "monopoly power" that makes it impossible for other advertising tools to adequately compete.
Announced via a press conference on Tuesday and a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the U.S. DoJ and a collection of states all complain that Google is anti-competitive when it comes to the ad business.
"Google's anticompetitive behavior has raised barriers to entry to artificially high levels," the complaint reads, continuing that the tech giant "forced key competitors to abandon the market for ad tech tools, dissuaded potential competitors from joining the market, and left Google's few remaining competitors marginalized and unfairly disadvantaged."
The search company stands accused of making acquisitions to "neutralize or eliminate" competitors, as part of a "cumulative and synergistic effect that has harmed competition and the competitive process."
The lawsuit has been a long time coming, with murmurs of a lawsuit going back to August 2022.
"Google abuses its monopoly power to disadvantage website publishers and advertisers who dare to use competing ad tech products in a search for higher quality, or lower cost, matches," the filing asserts. "Google uses its dominion over digital advertising technology to funnel more transactions to its own ad tech products where it extracts inflated fees to line its own pockets at the expense of the advertisers and publishers it purportedly serves."
Under the lawsuit, it is asked for the court to order Google into divesting its advertising businesses. While previously Google offered to put its ad auctions business into a separate company to its digital ad serving business, which would've shifted it under parent company Alphabet, the DoJ wants to go further.
USA versus Google - Another antitrust advertising lawsuit by Mike Wuerthele on Scribd
