San Francisco: 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 fuelling an internet empire currently worth $US1.8 trillion.
The ruling issued by US 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.
As it did in the search monopoly case, Google and its corporate parent Alphabet vehemently denied the Justice Department’s allegations.Credit: Bloomberg
After the US Justice Department targeted Google’s ubiquitous search engine during US President Donald Trump’s first administration, the same agency went after the company’s lucrative digital advertising network in 2023 during President Joe Biden’s ensuing administration in an attempt to undercut the power that Google has amassed since its inception in a Silicon Valley garage in 1998.
Although antitrust regulators prevailed both times, the battle is likely to continue for several more years as Google tries to overturn the two monopoly decisions in appeals while forging ahead in the new and highly lucrative technological frontier of artificial intelligence.
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 DC, where Justice Department lawyers will try to convince US 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 centres 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 $US3.2 billion purchase of online ad specialist DoubleClick in 2008. US regulators approved the deals at the time they were made before realising 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.
Although Brinkema didn’t rule entirely in favour of the Justice Department, the judge concluded Google has been abusing its power to stifle competition to the detriment of online publishers forced to rely on its ad network and pricing for revenue. Brinkema reached the decision after evaluating the evidence presented during a lengthy trial that concluded just before Thanksgiving last year,
