Google Goes On Trial (Again) Today
Google goes on trial today in the second of two antitrust cases brought by the federal government. This time around, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is accusing the tech giant of illegally maintaining a monopoly on digital advertising technologies.
“Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies,” the DOJ alleges in a civil lawsuit joined by eight states. It wants to force Google to divest parts of its ad tech stack, a suite of products that helps broker ad sales between website publishers and digital advertisers.
Google contends that the government is making a mistake that will harm not just Google but website publishers and digital advertisers. “Ad buyers and sellers have a huge range of choices among ad tech providers, and they exercise those choices daily,” wrote Google’s Vice President of Regulatory Affairs Lee-Anne Mulholland in a September 8 blog post. “The average advertiser uses three platforms to buy ads—and can choose from hundreds of options. And the average large publisher uses six platforms to sell ads—and can choose from over 80 options.”
Regulatory Revision and implicit threats
The case will get a bench trial, not a jury trial, and be decided by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema.
The DOJ says Google illegally maintained dominance in the digital ad tech market, in part by acquiring competitors.
The acquisitions in question—of something called AdMeld and something called DoubleClick—took place 13 and 16 years ago, respectively, and were approved by U.S. regulators at the time.
These sort of acquisitions aren’t unusual. Tech companies routinely buy up smaller companies that have developed innovative or valuable technologies.
But revisiting acquisitions that were deemed fine when they took place has been a theme in President Joe Biden’s antitrust agenda. It’s part of the administration’s larger hostility to businesses it deems too big.
It also creates an absolutely baffling situation for U.S. companies, who could—like Google in this case—get approval to acquire a product, spend more than a decade developing that product and building business systems and services around it, and then be told that maybe it has to give that product up.
The potential for government overreach and abuse in such a system is substantial. After all, if nothing was wrong when an acquisition occurred, what could retroactively make it against the law? The answer certainly appears to be that a company fell out of political favor.
If allowed to stand, this makes any acquisition precarious, as the federal government may decide more than a decade later that your conduct it previously approved was actually illegal. And fewer acquisitions can mean less innovation and fewer economies of scale, meaning it’s consumers who ultimately lose out.
This also seems like a weapon the government can use to strong-a
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