The US Department of Justice (DOJ) will, on Monday, begin hearing cases over an antitrust trial regarding Google’s allegedly monopolistic business practices.
Google will face questions over their advertising practices, which accounts for the vast majority of their total revenue and so could have a huge potential impact on how they continue operating their business.
Past Monopoly Trial
This is not the first time Google have faced an antitrust trial, as they faced a similar lawsuit just last month.
August’s trial covered their search engine monopoly. IT was alleged that Google had resorted to illegal monopolistic tactics to maintain their search dominance.
Illegal Monopoly
Google failed that trial, being found guilty of having an illegal advantage over their competitors such as DuckDuckGo and Microsoft’s Bing.
At the time, their unsuccessful defense was that their search engine was simply a better product, and that is why consumers chose Google over their competitors.
Advertising Revenue
Beginning this Monday, Google’s current antitrust trial will look at their advertising technology, and has the potential to cause severe damage to their bottom line.
Ad revenue is a colossal chunk of Google’s business, last year making up 77% of the company’s total revenue of $307 billion.
Implication for Google Customers
The DOJ will be making the case for customers, arguing that the practices employed by Google are negatively affecting them.
The implication of the case being put forward is that Google’s monopoly over advertising revenue has meant that they are able to unilaterally increase ad revenues without fair competition.
Gotcha Evidence
Google will have to make their case against the contents of one of their own executives messages, which made a banking analogy to illustrate Google’s dominance.
Google control buying and selling on the largest online ad exchange, which the Google advertising executive described as being as “if Goldman or Citibank owned the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange).”
DOJ Case
The DOJ will make the case that Google used a series of tactics from different angles to rise to and maintain their online ad dominance.
In their court filings, they said that Google’s practices “forced key competitors to abandon the market for ad tech tools, dissuaded potential competitors from joining the market, and left Google’s few remaining competitors marginalized and unfairly disadvantaged.”
Response From Google
Google, on the other hand, did not subscribe to the description of their actions by the DOJ, dismissing it as fantasy.
They are expected to argue that the lawsuit is “backward looking” and “out of touch with reality.”
Tons of Advertisement Choice
Google will go on to argue that they are only one among hundreds of advertisers that customers can go to to advertise their product.
Google regularly refer to a 2023 blog post where they say “no-one is forced to use our advertising technologies – they choose to use them because they’re effective.”
Tough to Call
An antitrust professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, Rebecca Haw Allensworth, believes the case may be complicated by the nature of advertising technology.
Although we all “intuitively understand” search technology, as in the recent case Google lost, ad technology, on the other hand, is “so complex that I think that’s going to be a real challenge for the government to make a clear, simple monopolization argument here.”
