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The US Department of Justice said it will seek to force Google parent Alphabet to sell key parts of its digital advertising business, which was found to constitute an illegal monopoly.
The DoJ on Friday told a federal judge that divestments of Google’s ad exchange and publisher ad server businesses are the only way to break its dominance. The former is the largest marketplace for bidding for online ad space and the latter is the technology online publishers use to list and sell ads on their websites.
The tech giant should also be required to share data on real-time ad bidding with competitors, the DoJ said in a Virginia court. US district Judge Leonie Brinkema set a trial date of September 22 to hear the proposals and Google’s rebuttals.
Last month, Brinkema ruled against Google, finding it had “wilfully” monopolised the online advertising market through acquisitions and by tying together its ad exchange and publisher server to shut out competitors and undercut them on pricing.
However, she rejected part of the justice department’s case, saying it was not able to prove Google unfairly dominated the third component of the market, advertiser ad networks.
Google has protested the ruling, saying it competes for online ad spending with other tech groups such as Meta, Amazon and TikTok. The company’s lawyers say it is willing to share real-time ad exchange data with rivals, but not sell any parts of its business.
Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s head of regulatory affairs, said: “The DoJ’s additional proposals to force a divestiture of our ad tech tools go well beyond the court’s findings, have no basis in law, and would harm publishers and advertisers.”
Ad tech is the third antitrust case Alphabet has lost in quick succession. Last year, another judge found it had also developed a monopoly in search by paying Apple more than $20bn a year to be the default browser on its devices. The DoJ has requested Google sell its chrome browser and share search data with rivals.
Chief executive Sundar Pichai on Wednesday appeared in a Washington court in the search remedies trial and argued the proposals were “far-reaching, so extraordinary” and amounted to giving away its intellectual property for free to rivals that could reverse engineer its search engine. He also said sharing data would jeopardise users’ privacy.
Alphabet has also been ordered to open up its Android operation system to rivals after a San Francisco judge found it used its Google Play Store to suppress competition in apps and charge excessive fees.
