The DOJ Is Doing Its Best To Make Google Unprofitable
The Department of Justice (DOJ) won its second major antitrust case against Google on Thursday. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia will now consider remedies for Google’s conduct, including divestiture from Google Ad Manager.
Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, who issued the opinion for the District Court in U.S. v. Google, found Google guilty of “willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power in the open-web display publisher ad server market and the open-web display ad exchange market.” Brinkema also found that Google violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by illegally bundling DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), which publishers use to sell ad space on their websites, and Google Ad Exchange (AdX), where advertisers bid for said ad space, into Google Ad Manager.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is currently considering what remedies to impose in an antitrust case against Google’s monopolization of the search engine market, which the company lost to the DOJ in August 2024. In this case, the DOJ proposed that Google divest from Android and Chrome, make its advertisement data available to competitors at zero cost, and allow publishers to deny Google access to their domains to train its generative AI models.
The proposed remedies in both cases threaten the company’s main source of revenue: Google Services, including Google Ads and products like Gmail, Google Drive, and YouTube, which Google’s present business model offers to users for free. Decl
Article from Reason.com
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