Google and the U.S. et al. v. Google: A High Court Action on the Google Ad-Tech Case in 2023
In a similar way, Judge Brinkema warned google over its failure to preserve internal communications due to deletion of chats between employees by the internal messaging app. She adds that while this “may well be sanctionable,” the court didn’t need to sanction the company in this case as it was able to make its decision using testimony and admitted evidence.
President Trump has signaled that his administration will continue taking a tough stance on antitrust for the tech industry, despite efforts by tech executives to court his favor. The F.T.C. chair and the Justice Department’s top antitrust role have said they will look into the power that tech companies have over online discourse. His first administration brought the case of the search engine.
The ad tech case — U.S. et al. v. Google — was filed in 2023 and concerns an intricate web of programs that sell ad space around the web, like on a news site or a recipes page. Every time a person loads a page, the suite of software conduct split-second auctions to place ads. That business generated $31 billion in 2023, or about a 10th of the overall revenue for Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
“We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, said in a statement to The Verge. “The Court found that our advertiser tools and our acquisitions, such as DoubleClick, don’t harm competition. The court made a decision regarding our publisher tools. Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective.”
Google, on the other hand, argued that the government’s whole view of the market was contrived and not based in reality. Google’s tools help publishers and advertisers make money, and the fact that it has tools in different parts of the market just helps them work well together to consumers’ benefit, they said. Google has legitimate business reasons for its behavior and the government simply wants to dictate how it can do business, they argued.
