Nine additional states in the U.S. have joined a federal lawsuit against tech giant company Google, claiming the company broke antitrust laws on its digital advertising business.
The U.S Department of Justice disclosed that the additional states that joined the lawsuit include; Michigan, Nebraska, Arizona, New Hampshire, Illinois, North Carolina, West Virginia, Minnesota, and Washington, as they accuse Google of monopolizing the online ad market, as they seek to break the company’s stronghold.
The justice department and attorneys general stated that Google’s suite of online ad tech tools technology to buy, sell and serve ads online, prevents competitors from entering the market and blocks publishers from monetizing their content. The Department further alleged that Google should be required to divest a host of entities that allow it to carry out offensively dominating behavior.
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The Justice Department says Google did four things to establish and protect its advertising dominance, which are, It bought up competitors, forced website publishers to use its ad tools, distorted the online ad marketplace, and manipulated online ad auctions.
Part of the lawsuit reads,
“Google’s competitive behavior has raised barriers to entry to artificially high levels, forced key competitors to abandon the market for ad tech tools, dissuaded potential competitors from joining the market, and left Google’s few remaining competitors marginalized and unfairly disadvantaged. Google is illegally using its outsized market share to take Supra-competitive profits for itself”.
The lawsuit further states that Google should be forced to sell its ad manager suite after abusing its dominance in the online advertising space. The Justice Department’s ad tech lawsuit followed a separate lawsuit filed in 2020, at the end of Donald Trump’s administration that accused the giant tech company of violating antitrust enforcement.
Google has for years faced scrutiny over its dominance in the ad tech space. From 2017 to 2019, the company was fined by the EU for allegedly abusing its market power and for limiting its rivals from working with companies that already had deals with Google’s Adsense platform.
It is also interesting to note that the EU has been investigating and bringing cases against Google for a very long time, but none of that action has had much of an impact on Google. Over a decade ago, the tech company was fined roughly $10 billion (8.6 billion Euros) by the EU, as those fines resulted from three separate antitrust violations alleged by the commission.
In a bid to fend off a lawsuit last year, Google had offered to split off parts of its ad-tech business into a separate company under the Alphabet umbrella. According to Insider Intelligence, Google remains the market leader by a long shot, even when its share of the US digital ad revenue has been eroding, falling from 36.7 percent in 2016 to 28.8 percent last year.