The ruling is the result of a 2023 lawsuit filed by the US Department of Justice.
Google has acted illegally by “wilfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power” in some of its advertising technology, a US court ruled yesterday (17 April).
Just last year, the search giant was declared a monopolist over its search engine distribution.
In her ruling, judge Leonie M Brinkema of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia wrote that the search giant monopolised parts of its publisher ad server and ad exchange, collectively called adtech, to dominate the ad market and make hefty profits.
The legal case was brought by the US Department of Justice in 2023, which claimed that the company asserted its dominance in the adtech space by eliminating competition through acquisitions, and forcing more publishers and advertisers to use its products over its competition.
It argued that Google had a monopoly in three key aspects of online advertising. For sellers or publishers, Google operates DoubleClick For Publishers (DFP). For buyers or advertisers looking to purchase ad space, the company has Google Ads and DV360. And as intermediary, conducting exchanges, Google operates AdX.
The court found that Google violated US law by maintaining its monopoly in the ad server and ad exchange market, as well as by tying DFP and AdX together, locking publishers into only using its products.
“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,” the judge ruled.
The judge, however, only found Google liable in two of these three areas, its publisher tools, DFP, and the software system, AdX. She found that the government failed to prove Google’s monopoly over the tools used by advertisers.
Now, the court will set a briefing schedule to determine the appropriate remedies for the antitrust violations.
Earlier this week, Google was sued in a class action lawsuit filed to the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal over its alleged dominant market position in online search.
Google has contracted phone makers to pre-install its search engines on their devices. By doing so, the £5bn lawsuit argues that Google offers better functionality to its own advertisements over others, harming competition.
Google has been sued a number of times over its adtech practices. Last year, the Canadian competition watchdog took legal action against the Alphabet-owned company for allegedly abusing its dominant position by locking market advertisers into using its own adtech tools.
While just months earlier, the UK Competition and Markets Authority provisionally found that Google’s adtech practices are harming advertisers and publishers.
The competition watchdog first began investigation Google’s adtech back in 2022.
Also last year, Google was sued by a collective of UK ad publishers who claimed that many online publishers in the country suffered losses because of Google’s unfair monopoly in adtech.
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