San Francisco (AP) – Google was described as abusive monopoly by a federal judge for the second time in less than a year, this time to illegally exploit part of its online marketing technology in order to stimulate the benefits which feed an internet empire of a value of $ 1.8 billion of dollars.
The decision published Thursday by the American district judge Leonie Brinkema in Virginia comes in the heels of A separate decision in August This concluded that Google’s namesake search engine illegally exploited its domination to stifle competition and innovation.
After the United States Ministry of Justice has targeted the omnipresent search engine of Google During President Donald Trump’s first term, the same agency continued the company’s lucrative digital advertising network in 2023 during The administration who followed President Joe Biden In an attempt to undermine the power Google has accumulated since its creation in a garage of Silicon Valley in 1998.
Although antitrust regulators have prevailed twice, the battle should continue for several additional years while Google tries to overturn the two decisions of monopoly of calls while launching into the new and very lucrative technological frontier of artificial intelligence.
The next step in the last case is a penalty phase that will probably start at the end of this year or at the start of next year. The same so-called appeal audiences in the search monopoly case should start on Monday in Washington DC, where lawyers of the Ministry of Justice will try to convince the American district judge Amit Mehta to impose a radical sentence that includes A requirement offered so that Google sells its Chrome web browser.
The 115 -page decisions of Brinkema are focused on the Marketing machine that Google has spent the last 17 years building around its search engine and other widely used products and services, including its Chrome browser, your YouTube video site and its digital cards.
The system was largely built around a series of acquisitions that started with the purchase of Google of 3.2 billion dollars of online advertisements DoubleClick in 2008. American regulators approved the offers when they were established before realizing that they had given to the Mountain View, California, a platform to manipulate prices of the prices in an ecosystem ecosystem.
The lawyers of the Ministry of Justice argued that Google has built and maintained dominant market positions in a technological trifecta used by website publishers to sell advertising space on their web pages, as well as the advertisers that advertisers use to obtain their advertisements in front of consumers and advertising exchanges that make automated auction of a second to match buyers and seller.
After evaluating the evidence presented during a long trial ended just before Thanksgiving last year, Brinkema made a decision that rejected the claims of the Ministry of Justice that Google has mistreated advertisers while concluding that the company abused its power to suffocate competition with the detriment of online publishers forced to rely on its network for income.
“For more than a decade, Google has equaled its advertising server and its exchange of advertisements by the advertising server through contractual policies and technological integration, which has enabled the company to establish and protect its monopoly power on these two markets.” Brinkema wrote. “Google has also rooted its monopoly power by imposing anti -competitive policies on its customers and eliminating the characteristics of desirable products.”
Despite this reprimand, Brinkema also concluded that Google had not broken the law when he took DoubleClick or when he followed this agreement a few years later by buying another service, Admeld.
The Ministry of Justice “did not show that the acquisitions of DoubleClick and Admeld were anti -competitive,” wrote Brinkema. “Although these acquisitions have helped Google acquire monopoly power in two adjacent technological markets, they are insufficient, when considered isolated, to prove that Google has acquired or maintained this monopoly power through exclusion practices.”
This observation can help Google fight against any attempt to force it to sell its advertising technology to stop its monopolistic behavior.
“This is a historic victory in the current fight to prevent Google from monopolizing digital public square,” said American prosecutor Pamela Bondi said in a press release.
In a statement, Google said it would appeal the decision.
“We do not agree with the decision of the Court concerning our publisher tools,” said Lee-Anne Mulholland, vice-president of Google regulatory affairs. “Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our advertising technology tools are simple, affordable and effective.”
Analysts such as Brian Pitz of BMO Markets predicted that Google would probably lose the case, helping to prepare investors for the last setback for the company and its corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., whose shares decreased by around 1% on Thursday to end $ 151.22. Alphabet actions have plunged 20% so far this year.
In addition to research and advertising, Google is also fighting Verdict of a federal jury in 2023 This has determined its play store for applications on smartphones powered by its Android software is also an illegal monopoly.
As he did in the search monopoly case, Google vehemently denied the allegations of the Ministry of Justice. Its lawyers argued that the government had largely based its argument on a obsolete concept of a market that existed ten years ago while underestimating a highly competitive market for advertising expenses which includes parent Meta Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Comcast platforms.
The market as it is established in the case of the Ministry of Justice did not include advertisements that appear on mobile applications, streaming television services or other platforms on which Internet users have migrated more and more, which prompted Google Lawyer Karen Dunn to compare the definition of government a “temporal capsule with a blackberry, an iPod and a blockbuster video card” of his declaration of opening ” When the trial started last September.
At the trial, lawyers of the Ministry of Justice underlined the damage to information publishers who were born from the alleged domination of Google on the market. Witnesses of Gannett, the publisher of USA Today and other newspapers, and News Corp., the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, testified on the difficulties they encountered and what they said to be a lack of alternatives to Google’s advertising technology. These companies are counting on online advertising to finance their news operations and make their articles free for consumers on the Internet, have supported government lawyers.
Now the government is able to try to dismantle this Byzantine advertising system. When the case was deposited more than two years ago during the Biden administration, the Ministry of Justice said that Google should be forced to sell, at least, its advertising manager product, which includes the technology used by website publishers and AD Ranges.
