TECH NEWS – The Department of Justice (DoJ) filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google… and won!
Regulators are increasingly targeting tech giants and ensuring that anti-competitive practices do not become the norm. Any company that violates antitrust laws will be held accountable. The legal battle between the DoJ and Google is one such long-running case. This ruling could determine the future course of Google, or even the industry. After a three-week trial and subsequent arguments, the court ruled that Google had indeed violated the Sherman Antitrust Act and will now decide on the penalties for the violation.
The DoJ has long singled out the Alphabet subsidiary for its advertising technology practices, and the trial lasted about three weeks with extensive post-trial briefing. The court has now ruled in favor of the DoJ in an antitrust case against Google, accusing the tech giant of maintaining a monopoly in the digital advertising technology industry. According to the ruling, Google violated the law in two key areas of digital advertising, maintaining monopolies in ad exchanges and publisher ad servers. The company also illegally bundled its products, such as its ad server and ad exchange, to prevent competition.
Based on these findings, Google violated Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. “Plaintiffs have proven that Google willfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts to achieve and maintain monopoly power in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets for display advertising on the open Web,” said U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema. But this is only a partial victory, as the claim that Google has a dominant position in ad networks was rejected. Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland, emphasized that the case had been won and that the company would appeal.
“The court agreed that our tools for advertisers and acquisitions like DoubleClick don’t harm competition. However, we respectfully disagree with the ruling on our publisher tools – publishers have many choices, and they use Google because our ad technology is easy to use, cost-effective and delivers results,” Mulholland added.
Google and the DoJ will face off again on appeal. The DoJ says Google should opt for divestiture and get rid of the Chrome browser. It is not yet known what penalties will be imposed to remedy the violations.
Source: WCCFTech
