Today, Google is facing a new test in federal court. US government lawyers are asking a judge to break apart the search engine giant’s ad technology division.
According to AFP, this is Google’s second lawsuit of the year. Earlier this month, a judge turned down a similar request by the government to break up the company’s empire.
The issue today is all about Google’s ad tech “stack,” which is the set of tools that website owners use to sell advertising and advertisers use to buy them.
Earlier this year, Federal Judge Leonie Brinkema made a historic ruling that Google had an illegal hold on this market, which the US Department of Justice (DOJ) concurred with.
The tribunal today will decide what reforms and punishments Google must make to end its monopoly.
The US government will argue that Google should separate its ad publisher and exchange businesses, according to court documents. The DOJ also wants Google to be banned from running an ad exchange for 10 years after the sales are finished.
Google will say that the demands to sell off parts of the company go too far beyond what the court found, are impossible to do, and would hurt the market and small firms.
Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s Vice President of Regulatory Affairs, stated, “From the beginning, we’ve said that the DOJ’s case doesn’t understand how digital advertising works and doesn’t take into account how the landscape has changed dramatically, with more competition and new players.”
The European Commission, which is in charge of enforcing EU antitrust laws, fined Google 2.95 billion euros ($3.47 billion) this month for controlling the ad tech industry.
Brussels told Google to adjust its behavior, which led to complaints that the company was being too lenient because it had said before that it might need to sell off some assets.
The US trial’s remedy phase comes after a prior trial that determined Google had an illegal monopoly. The trial is likely to last approximately a week, and the court will gather again a few weeks later to hear final arguments.
The trial starts in the same month that another judge turned down a government request for Google to give up its Chrome browser. This was considered as a big win for the internet giant.
The US Department of Justice also initiated a complaint against the internet giant for running an illegal monopoly in the online search arena.
Google didn’t have to break up its business, but it did have to share data with its competitors as part of the deal.
The US government wanted Chrome to be sold since it is a key means to get to the internet and brings in a third of all Google web searches.
Since that judgment, shares in Alphabet, the company that owns Google, have gone up by more than 20%.
Judge Brinkema has said in pre-trial hearings that she will attentively look at the results of the search trial when deciding what to do next in her own case.
These charges are part of a larger, bipartisan government effort to go after the biggest tech companies in the globe.
The US has five antitrust cases against these kinds of corporations right now.
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