Nine states on Monday joined a Department of Justice lawsuit seeking to break up its alleged monopolistic advertising business. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo
April 17 (UPI) — The attorney generals of nine states on Monday joined the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Google that seeks to break up the Internet behemoth’s alleged monopoly over digital advertising.
The states, including Arizona, Illinois, Michigan and Minnesota, added their names Monday to litigation federal prosecutors filed in January alongside eight states against Google on accusations that over the last 15 years it “has used anticompetitive, exclusionary and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies.”
“Google has created an unlawful environment in the digital world that has caused harm to online publishers and advertisers by weakening a free and open Internet,” Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raul said Monday in a statement.
“Google cannot continue its monopolies in digital advertising technologies.”
The 156-page complaint against Google accuses the Internet giant of monopolizing the digital advertising market by neutralizing ad tech competitors through acquisitions and then using its dominance in digital advertising markets to force publishers and advertisers to use its products, while also working to disrupt competing products.
The ad tools in question are key digital technologies that website publishers require to sell ads and that advertisers need to buy ad space to reach potential clients. The lawsuit states that Google’s market share for publisher ad servers went from 60% in 2008 to 90% by 2015, and continues to climb.
Its dominance has resulted in Google, on average, keeping at least 30 cents of every advertising dollar that goes from advertisers to website publishers through its ad tech tools, the document states.
“Whenever Google’s customers and competitors responded with innovation that threatened Google’s stranglehold over any one of these ad tech tools, Google’s anticompetitive response has been swift and effective,” the court document reads. “Each time a threat has emerged, Google has used its market power in one or more of these ad tech tools to quash the threat.
“The result: Google’s plan for durable, industry-wide dominance has succeeded.”
UPI reached out to Google for comment, and the U.S. company forwarded its initial response to the lawsuit, which rebuked it as the Justice Department “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 current administration has stressed the value of antitrust enforcement in reducing prices and expanding choice for the American people. We agree,” it said in the January statement. “But this lawsuit would have the opposite effect, making it harder for Google to offer efficient advertising tools that benefit publishers, advertisers and the wider U.S. economy.”
The Justice Department also filed a separate lawsuit against Google in 2020 over its alleged anti-competitive and exclusionary practices in the search and search advertising markets.
That lawsuit, which is scheduled to go to trial in September, also accuses it of conducting “monopolistic business practices.”
“We look forward to litigating this important case alongside our state law enforcement partners to end Google’s long-running monopoly in digital advertising technology markets,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Doha Mekki of the Justice Department’s antitrust division said Monday in a statement.
