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| The US Department of Justice files a lawsuit against Google |
The US Department of Justice filed a federal lawsuit against Google on Tuesday, accusing Google of abusing its dominant position in the online advertising market.
In October 2020, the DOJ also sued Google for violating antitrust laws, ordering it to "restore competition in the search engine and search advertising markets".
Today, eight US states join the Department of Justice: Virginia, California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Tennessee.
The suit states that "one of the industry giants, Google, has distorted legitimate competition in the advertising technology industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to control various high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers and intermediaries to enable digital advertising."
"After addressing all aspects of the digital advertising market, Google engaged in non-competitive, proprietary, and illegal means to eliminate or significantly mitigate any threat to its dominance in digital advertising technology," the suit reads.
The US government says that Google is using its control of advertising technology services to force advertisers and publishers to use them, and to buy other companies in the advertising market to beat competitors.
Google now controls the technology most major web publishers use to sell ad space, the tools advertisers use to buy ad space, and connect advertisers to publishers when they sell ad space.
Google said the lawsuit was unfounded and ignored the fierce competition in the online advertising industry.
"The lawsuit filed today by the Department of Justice aims to pick winners and losers in the competitive ad tech industry," the company added in a blog post. It duplicates the largely unsubstantiated lawsuits from the Texas Attorney General, several of which were recently dismissed in federal court. "
To that end, the court was asked to order the dissolution of Google's advertising division in order to end the company's market power.
It should be noted that this is not the first time that Google has been accused of abusing its dominance in the online advertising market: four years ago, the company was fined 4.34 billion euros for using the dominant position of the Android operating system in the smartphone market. Advertising market dominance.
The company was fined $2.72 billion in 2017 for abusing its market dominance to diminish search results, fined $1.7 billion in 2019 for uncompetitive behavior in the search engine and online advertising market and two years later for outselling its competitors in its services. He was fined 220 million euros per month. June 2021.