Alexandria, Virginia — Google is already facing a possible breakup of the company via its ubiquitous search engineis fighting to fend off another attack from the US Department of Justice alleging monopolistic behavior, this time due to technology that online advertising towards consumers.
The Justice Department and Google will hold closing arguments Monday in a lawsuit alleging that Google’s advertising technology constitutes an illegal monopoly.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, will decide the case and is expected to issue a written ruling by the end of the year. If Brinkema finds that Google has engaged in illegal, monopolistic behavior, she will hold further hearings to investigate what remedies should be imposed.
The Justice Department, along with a coalition of states, has already said it believes Google should be forced to sell its ad technology business, which generates tens of billions of dollars annually for the Mountain View, California-based company.
After about a month of testimonials earlier this year, the arguments in the case remain the same.
The Justice Department alleges that Google has built and maintains a monopoly in “open web display ads,” essentially the rectangular ads that appear at the top and right of the page when people are browsing websites.
Google dominates all facets of the market: a technology called ‘DoubleClick’ is widely used by news sites and other online publishers, while ‘Google Ads’ maintains a cache of advertisers large and small who want to place their ads on the right web page. the right consumer.
In between is another Google product, AdExchange, which conducts near-instantaneous auctions matching advertisers with publishers.
In court filings, Justice Department lawyers say Google is “more concerned with acquiring and maintaining its trifecta of monopolies than with serving its own publisher and advertiser customers or winning on the merits.”
As a result, content providers and news organizations have never been able to generate the online revenue they should have because of Google’s excessive fees for brokering transactions between advertisers and publishers, the government says.
Google argues the government’s case is wrongly focused on a narrow niche of online advertising. Looking more broadly at online advertising, including social media, streaming TV services and app-based advertising, Google says it only has 25% of the market, a share that is declining as it faces increasing and evolving competition .
Google claims in court filings that the government’s lawsuit “amounts to the persistent complaints of a handful of Google’s rivals and several giant publishers.”
Google also says it has invested billions in technology that enables the efficient matching of advertisers with interested consumers and that it should not be forced to share its technology and success with competitors.
“Requiring a company to do further technical work to make its technology and customers accessible to all its competitors on the terms they choose has never been mandated by U.S. antitrust law,” the company wrote.
The case in Virginia is separate from an ongoing lawsuit against Google in the District of Columbia over the search engine of the same name. In that case, the judge has determined that the search engine constitutes an illegal monopoly, but has not yet decided what remedy to impose.
The Justice Department said last week that it will try to force Google to do so selling its Chrome web browserin addition to a host of other punishments. Google has said the department’s request is excessive and unrelated to legitimate regulations.