The US Department of Justice is suing Google for monopoly

The US Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit on Tuesday Googlea subsidiary of Alphabet, for its online advertising business.

The department and eight other states accuse the tech giant of illegally abusing its dominance in digital advertising and violating the Sherman Antitrust Act.

“An industry giant, Google, has bribed legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the vast array of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers and brokers to facilitate digital advertising.” states the lawsuit.

He adds, “Competition in the ad tech space was disrupted for reasons that were neither accidental nor unavoidable.”

The lawsuit, filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, asks a court to force the company to get rid of Google Ad Manager (its ad management platform) and to bar Google from continuing to engage in any of the practical anti-competitive actions described in the his complaint.

This is the second major antitrust lawsuit the Justice Department has filed against Google in the past three years, after it announced in 2020, along with a coalition of attorneys general, the lawsuit for using anticompetitive tactics to illegally monopolize the search and advertising markets. online .

The vast majority of Google’s revenue (81% in 2021) comes from advertising. In 2021 it entered 209,000 million for this concept, a figure that makes it the largest advertising company in the world.

Google’s advertising dominance stems in large part from its acquisition of advertising technology that has given it an advantage in ad serving over its competitors.

In 2007, it bought DoubleClick, an advertising services company that allowed it to sell display ads on websites.

In 2010, it acquired AdMob, a mobile advertising network, with which it launched its mobile advertising business.

New in development