A federal judge dealt Alphabet Inc.’s Google another major regulatory blow Thursday, ruling the company illegally dominated two markets for online advertising.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said Google unlawfully monopolized markets for publisher ad servers and ad exchanges between buyers and sellers. Her decision, which addresses the $31 billion portion of Google’s ad business that matches website publishers with advertisers, came after she presided over a three-week trial last year.
In her decision, Brinkema said that by tying its ad server and ad exchange together, Google was able to “establish and protect its monopoly power in these two markets.”
“In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web,” she wrote.
The ruling could ostensibly let prosecutors push for a dismantling of Google’s ad products that includes the sell-off of Google Ad Manager, which entails the company’s publisher ad server and its ad exchange. Google has previously explored selling off its ad exchange to appease European antitrust regulators, Reuters reported in September.
During the trial, Google lawyers argued it made significant efforts to make tools to connect to rival products, and that it faced competition from Amazon.com Inc., Comcast Corp., and others as digital ad spending shifted to apps and streaming video.
Google already faces the prospect of being forced to sell assets or change its business practices in online search following a separate court loss. Next week, a judge in Washington, D.C., will hold a trial on the Justice Department’s request to make Google sell its Chrome browser.
Additionally, a federal jury in December 2023 found Google’s app store was an illegal monopoly.
The online advertising lawsuit stems from a January 2023 lawsuit by the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and a coalition of states. They alleged Google’s monopolization of the digital advertising market. The DoJ claimed Google’s dominance stemmed to acquisitions, including its $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick that closed in 2008, and anti-competitive practices that let it control the ad tech ecosystem.
The government’s latest win over Google in court is part of a wider push by regulators to rein in the vast powers of Big Tech players Amazon, Apple Inc., Google, and Meta Platforms Inc. This week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in an antitrust trial in Washington, D.C., in which the Federal Trade Commission accused the social media giant of buying then-startup rivals WhatsApp and Instagram to quash competition.
“Case by case, antitrust enforcers are taming the beasts of Big Tech,” Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project, said in an email assessing the online advertising decision by Brinkema. “Yet another monumental win in the history of antitrust enforcement, this case in particular is a win for journalists, publishers, online content creators and the distributed open web.”
