One month after a decide declared Google’s search engine an unlawful monopoly, the tech large faces one other antitrust lawsuit that threatens to interrupt up the corporate, this time over its advertising technology.
The U.S. Justice Department, joined by a coalition of states, and Google every made opening statements Monday to a federal decide who will resolve whether or not Google holds a monopoly over on-line advertising technology.
The regulators contend that Google constructed, acquired and maintains a monopoly over the technology that matches on-line publishers to advertisers. Dominance over the software program on each the purchase facet and the promote facet of the transaction permits Google to maintain as a lot as 36 cents on the greenback when it brokers gross sales between publishers and advertisers, the federal government contends in court docket papers.
They allege that Google additionally controls the advert change market, which matches the purchase facet to the promote facet.
“It’s worth saying the quiet part out loud,” Justice Department lawyer Julia Tarver Wood mentioned throughout her opening assertion. “One monopoly is bad enough. But a trifecta of monopolies is what we have here.”
Google says the federal government’s case relies on an web of yesteryear, when desktop computer systems dominated and web customers fastidiously typed exact World Wide Web addresses into URL fields. Advertisers now usually tend to flip to social media firms like TikTok or streaming TV companies like Peacock to achieve audiences.
In her opening assertion, Google lawyer Karen Dunn mentioned, “We are one big company among many others, competing millisecond by millisecond for every ad impression.”
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Revenue has truly declined lately for Google Networks, the division of the Mountain View, California-based tech large that features such companies as AdSense and Google Ad Manager which can be on the coronary heart of the case, from $31.7 billion in 2021 to $31.3 billion in 2023, in line with the corporate’s annual experiences.
The trial that started Monday in Alexandria, Virginia, over the alleged advert tech monopoly was initially going to be a jury trial, however Google maneuvered to power a bench trial, writing a examine to the federal authorities for greater than $2 million to moot the one declare introduced by the federal government that required a jury.
The case will now be determined by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who was appointed to the bench by former President Bill Clinton and is greatest identified for prime-profile terrorism trials together with that of Sept. 11 defendant Zacarias Moussaoui. Brinkema, although, additionally has expertise with extremely technical civil trials, working in a courthouse that sees an outsize variety of patent infringement circumstances.
The Virginia case comes on the heels of a serious defeat for Google over its search engine, which generates the vast majority of the corporate’s $307 billion in annual income. A decide within the District of Columbia declared the search engine a monopoly, maintained partly by tens of billions of {dollars} Google pays annually to firms like Apple to lock in Google because the default search engine introduced to shoppers after they purchase iPhones and different devices.
In that case, the decide has not but imposed any cures. The authorities hasn’t provided its proposed sanctions, although there may very well be shut scrutiny over whether or not Google must be allowed to proceed to make exclusivity offers that guarantee its search engine is shoppers’ default choice.
Peter Cohan, a professor of administration apply at Babson College, mentioned the Virginia case might doubtlessly be extra dangerous to Google as a result of the apparent treatment could be requiring it to dump elements of its advert tech enterprise that generate billions of {dollars} in annual income.
“Divestitures are definitely a possible remedy for this second case,” Cohan mentioned “It could be potentially more significant than initially meets the eye.”
In the Virginia trial, the federal government’s witnesses are anticipated to incorporate executives from newspaper publishers together with The New York Times Co. and Gannett, and on-line information websites that the federal government contends have confronted explicit hurt from Google’s practices.
“Google extracted extraordinary fees at the expense of the website publishers who make the open internet vibrant and valuable,” authorities legal professionals wrote in court docket papers. “As publishers generate less money from selling their advertising inventory, publishers are pushed to put more ads on their websites, to put more content behind costly paywalls, or to cease business altogether.”
Google disputes that it expenses extreme charges in comparison with its opponents. The firm additionally asserts the combination of its technology on the purchase facet, promote facet and within the center assures advertisements and net pages load shortly and improve safety. And it says clients have choices to work with exterior advert exchanges.
Google says the federal government’s case is badly centered on show advertisements and banner advertisements that load on net pages accessed by way of a desktop laptop and fails to consider shoppers’ migration to cellular apps and the increase in advertisements positioned on social media websites over the final 15 years.
The authorities’s case “focuses on a limited type of advertising viewed on a narrow subset of websites when user attention migrated elsewhere years ago,” Google’s legal professionals wrote in a pretrial submitting. “The last year users spent more time accessing websites on the ‘open web,’ rather than on social media, videos, or apps, was 2012.”
The trial, which is predicted to final a number of weeks, is going down in a courthouse that rigidly adheres to conventional practices, together with a resistance to technology within the courtroom. Cellphones are banned from the courthouse, to the chagrin of a tech press corps accustomed on the District of Columbia trial to tweeting out stay updates as they occur.
Even the legal professionals, and there are a lot of on each side, are restricted of their technology. At a pretrial listening to Wednesday, Google’s legal professionals made a plea for greater than the 2 computer systems both sides is permitted to have within the courtroom throughout trial. Brinkema rejected it.
“This is an old-fashioned courtroom,” she mentioned.
© 2024 The Canadian Press
