Google has been branded as an abusive monopoly by a federal judge for the second time in less than a year, this time using some of its online marketing technology illegally to increase profits that drive the internet empire now worth $1.8 trillion.
The ruling issued Thursday by Virginia Judge Leonie Brinkema, ends in August following a separate decision. Google’s search engine with the same name They have illegally used their control to curb competition and innovation.
After the US Department of Justice targeted Google’s ubiquitous search engines during President Donald Trump’s first administration, the same agency chased the company’s lucrative digital ad network in 2023 during President Joe Biden’s subsequent administration, trying to capture the power Google has accumulated since its establishment in Silicon Valley Garage in 1998.
Antitrust regulators have been ahead of both eras, but the battle could last for several more years as Google is trying to overturn two monopoly decisions while moving forward with the frontier of artificial intelligence’s new and highly lucrative technology.
The next step in the latest case is the penalty phase that is likely to begin later this year or early next year. The same so-called relief hearing in the search exclusive case is scheduled to begin Monday in Washington, D.C. There, Justice Department lawyers try to convince US District Judge Amit Mehta to impose drastic punishments, including the requirements proposed to Google. We sell Chrome web browsers.
Brinkema’s 115-page decision is at the heart of a marketing machine that Google has built search engines, Chrome browsers, YouTube video sites, and digital maps for the past 17 years.
The system was built around a series of acquisitions that began in 2008 with the $3.2 billion purchase of Google’s online advertising specialist DoubleClick. US regulators approved the deal when they were created when they realized that California, California companies had provided a platform to manipulate prices for the ecosystems they rely on to consume a wide range of websites.
Justice Department lawyers argued that Google would build and maintain a dominant market position in the triple of technology used by website publishers to sell advertising space on web pages, and to carry out the technology advertisers use to get ads in front of consumers, as well as the second most automated advertisers to buyers and sellers.
After evaluating the evidence presented in a lengthy trial that ended just before Thanksgiving last year, Brinkema reached a decision that Google rejected the Justice Department’s claim and that Google rejected the decision that it was abusing advertisers.
“For over a decade, Google has been linking publisher ad servers with ad exchanges through contract policies and technology integration. This has allowed the company to establish and protect its monopoly in these two markets,” wrote Brinkema. “Google has further cemented its monopoly by imposing anti-competitive policies on its customers and removing desirable product features.”
Despite that responsibilities, Brinkema concluded that when Google snapped Doubleclick or when it purchased another service a few years later and followed up on the transaction.
The Justice Department “didn’t show that double-clicks and Admeld’s acquisition is anti-competitive,” Brinkema wrote. “These acquisitions helped Google acquire monopoly in two adjacent ad technology markets, but it would be insufficient to be displayed alone to prove that Google has acquired or maintained this monopoly through exclusive practices.”
That discovery may help Google fight an attempt to force it to sell advertising technology to stop its exclusive behavior.
The Justice Department did not immediately comment on the judge’s decision.
In a statement, Google said it would appeal to the ruling.
“We do not agree with the court’s decision regarding publisher tools,” said Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs. “I choose Google because publishers have many choices and advertising technology tools are simple, affordable and effective.”
Analysts such as BMO Market’s Brian Pitts and others predict that Google is likely to lose cases, supporting investors for the latest set-off of the company and its parent Alphabet Inc., whose stocks fell 1% in afternoon trading. Alphabet’s stock has plummeted 20% so far this year.
Like a search monopoly case, Google and its company’s parent alphabet vehemently denied the Justice Department’s allegations. Their lawyers argued that the government primarily based the case on an outdated concept of the market that existed 10 years ago, and that it underestimated the highly competitive market due to Facebook’s parent metaplatform, Amazon, Microsoft, Comcast and other ad spending.
The market depicted in the Department of Justice case did not include ads that appeared on mobile apps, streaming television services, or other platforms that Internet users were increasingly migrating. Google lawyer Karendan urged the government to compare its definition with “time capsules with blackberry, iPod and blockbuster video cards.”
At the trial, Justice Department lawyers highlighted the harm to news publishers arising from Google’s alleged market control. Witnesses from Gannett, publisher of USA Today and other newspapers, and News Corp., publisher of Wall Street Journal, testified about the difficulties they faced and what they said were the lack of an alternative to Google’s advertising technology. These companies rely on online advertising to fund news operations and free articles to internet consumers, government lawyers argue.
The government is currently in a position to dismantle its Byzantine advertising system. When the lawsuit was filed during the Biden administration more than two years ago, the Justice Department argued that Google should be forced to at least sell advertising manager products that include technology used by website publishers and ad exchanges.
