by WorldTribune Staff, January 24, 2023

The Department of Justice on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against Google, alleging that it abuses monopoly power in the ad-tech industry.

The DOJ “is seeking the breakup of Google’s business brokering digital advertising across much of the Internet,” the Wall Street Journal reported on the suit filed in federal court in Virginia.

The lawsuit asks the court to unwind Google’s “anticompetitive acquisitions,” such as its 2008 purchase of ad-serving company DoubleClick, and calls for the divestiture of its ad exchange.

“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,” the complaint read.

A Google spokesman said the lawsuit “attempts to pick winners and losers in the highly competitive advertising technology sector.”

“DOJ is doubling down on a flawed argument that would slow innovation, raise advertising fees, and make it harder for thousands of small businesses and publishers to grow,” the spokesman said.

Google gets about 80% of its business from advertising. The DOJ’s new suit “targets the subset of that ad business that brokers the buying and selling of ads on other websites and apps,” the Journal noted.

Google reported $31.7 billion in revenue in 2021 from that ad-brokering activity, or about 12% of Alphabet’s total revenue. Google distributes about 70% of that revenue to web publishers and developers.

Last year, Google offered to split off parts of its ad-tech business into a separate company under the Alphabet umbrella to fend off the most recent investigation, but DOJ officials rejected the offer and decided to pursue the lawsuit instead.

For years, Google has faced allegations from advertising- and media-industry executives, lawmakers and regulators that its presence at multiple points of the online ad-buying process harms publishers and gives it an unfair advantage over rivals. Google also operates the most popular search engine and the largest online video-streaming site, YouTube, giving rise to allegations it has tilted the market in its own favor.

Related: Google bans advertising on content challenging Left’s climate change narrative, October 10, 2021

Rivals say that Google’s power in digital advertising stems from a series of acquisitions Google used to build its ad-tech business, beginning with the company’s $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick. The FTC approved the merger in a controversial decision. Google went on to purchase a host of other startups including the mobile-advertising company AdMob.

“Having inserted itself into all aspects of the digital advertising marketplace, Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies,” the DOJ’s complaint states.

Google has said it has no plans to sell or exit the ad-tech business.

In 2021, Google agreed to give British antitrust regulators effective veto power over elements of its plans to remove a technology called third-party cookies from its Chrome browser to settle an investigation there into the plan.

In France, Google agreed to pay a fine of 220 million euros, equivalent to about $239 million, and to improve data access to competing ad-tech companies, to not use its data in ways rivals couldn’t reproduce to settle a similar antitrust investigation in the country.

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  DOJ sues Google, seeks to break up digital advertising monopoly, WorldTribune.com