The Biden Administration filed a civil antitrust suit against Google on Tuesday, alleging that the Big Tech giant abuses its dominance of the online advertising business and monopolizes key digital advertising technologies, the US Department of Justice announced on its website.
The antitrust lawsuit that the DOJ filed against Google on Tuesday in the US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, along with the Attorneys General of California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Virginia, points out that the tech giant has illegally crushed or diminished any major threats to its dominance over the online advertising industry by using “anti-competitive, exclusionary” practices.
The Big Tech behemoth’s revenue is based largely (about 80%) on advertising.
The complaint alleges that Google monopolizes the “ad tech stack,” key digital advertising technologies that advertisers rely on to buy ads and reach potential customers and website publishers depend on to sell ads.
The DOJ said that Google – which owns dominant services enabling customers to offer advertising space – has thwarted meaningful competition and deterred innovation in the digital advertising industry.
It also accuses the company of taking supra-competitive profits for itself and preventing the free market from functioning fairly, hence hurting the interests of the advertisers and publishers who make today’s powerful internet possible.
The lawsuit alleged that Google has left advertisers and websites little choice but to use its services since leveraging its size and reaching to buy out or disrupt actual or potential competitors and is now calling for the company to be forced to sell off parts of its advertising business.
Describing the DOJ’s arguments as flawed, Google argued that the Biden administration is trying to pick winners and losers in the “highly competitive” online advertising business.
The company said in a statement that the latest lawsuit largely duplicates arguments made in a Texas lawsuit that the federal court has recently dismissed.
Google faces another trial later this year over the antitrust lawsuit the administration of former President Donald Trump filed in 2020, alleging Google’s anticompetitive practices in its dominant online search business.
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