DoJ Wins Another Victory: Google's Ad Tech Empire Violates Antitrust Laws

Google has an illegal monopoly in online advertising, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said today. Google is guilty of "willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power" in the publisher ad server market that websites use for ads and the open-web display ad exchange market that matches advertisers with websites.

Publishers that wanted to use Google's ad exchange were also required to use its ad server, which disadvantaged competing platforms. Google's "First Look" feature gave its ad exchange the first right of refusal for impressions, and "Last Look" let its platform assess bids from competitors before making its own bid.

Google later rolled out Unified Pricing Rules limiting the pricing strategies that publishers used to reduce dependence on Google ads and screen out low-quality content, which the court says favored Google's ad tech growth while harming rival ad tech products. Google's scale and "vast repositories" of data about advertisers, publishers, and users limits competition.

According to the court, Google's actions have resulted in significant harm to advertisers, publishers, and consumers.

Google could be required to divest its publisher ad server and exchange products, make changes to how it operates to prevent anticompetitive practices in the future, and pay fines. The court plans to decide on appropriate remedies at a future hearing.

Today's antitrust ruling comes as Google gears up to face off with the U.S. Department of Justice over its online search monopoly. The DoJ plans to push for Google to sell off its Chrome browser.