Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
---

Title: Federal Judge Declares Google's Digital Ad Network Is an Illegal
Monopoly

Link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/04/17/19502...

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from the Associated Press:
Google has been branded an abusive monopolist by a federal judge for the
second time in less than a year, this time for illegally exploiting some of
its online marketing technology to boost the profits fueling an internet
empire currently worth $1.8 trillion. The ruling issued Thursday by U.S.
District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Virginia comes on the heels of a separate
decision in August that concluded Google's namesake search engine has been
illegally leveraging its dominance to stifle competition and innovation.
[...] The next step in the latest case is a penalty phase that will likely
begin late this year or early next year. The same so-called remedy hearings
in the search monopoly case are scheduled to begin Monday in Washington D.C.,
where Justice Department lawyers will try to convince U.S. District Judge
Amit Mehta to impose a sweeping punishment that includes a proposed
requirement for Google to sell its Chrome web browser. Brinkema's 115-page
decision centers on the marketing machine that Google has spent the past 17
years building around its search engine and other widely used products and
services, including its Chrome browser, YouTube video site and digital maps.
The system was largely built around a series of acquisitions that started
with Google's $3.2 billion purchase of online ad specialist DoubleClick in
2008. U.S. regulators approved the deals at the time they were made before
realizing that they had given the Mountain View, California, company a
platform to manipulate the prices in an ecosystem that a wide range of
websites depend on for revenue and provides a vital marketing connection to
consumers. The Justice Department lawyers argued that Google built and
maintained dominant market positions in a technology trifecta used by website
publishers to sell ad space on their webpages, as well as the technology that
advertisers use to get their ads in front of consumers, and the ad exchanges
that conduct automated auctions in fractions of a second to match buyer and
seller. After evaluating the evidence presented during a lengthy trial that
concluded just before Thanksgiving last year, Brinkema reached a decision
that rejected the Justice Department's assertions that Google has been
mistreating advertisers while concluding the company has been abusing its
power to stifle competition to the detriment of online publishers forced to
rely on its network for revenue. "For over a decade, Google has tied its
publisher ad server and ad exchange together through contractual policies and
technological integration, which enabled the company to establish and protect
its monopoly power in these two markets." Brinkema wrote. "Google further
entrenched its monopoly power by imposing anticompetitive policies on its
customers and eliminating desirable product features." Despite that rebuke,
Brinkema also concluded that Google didn't break the law when it snapped
Doubleclick nor when it followed up that deal a few years later by buying
another service, Admeld. The Justice Department "failed to show that the
DoubleClick and Admeld acquisitions were anticompetitive," Brinkema wrote.
"Although these acquisitions helped Google gain monopoly power in two
adjacent ad tech markets, they are insufficient, when viewed in isolation, to
prove that Google acquired or maintained this monopoly power through
exclusionary practices." That finding may help Google fight off any attempt
to force it to sell its advertising technology to stop its monopolistic
behavior.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

---
VRSS v2.1.180528