• The US Justice Department and 8 states have filed a major antitrust case against Google, accusing the company of maintaining an illegal monopoly over the online ad business.
• The lawsuit calls for Google to divest its Google Ad Manager suite, including both its publisher ad server and ad exchange.
• Google has faced a steady drumbeat of regulators accusing it of antitrust violations since 2017, when the European Commission fined the company a then-record $2.73 billion.
• Google’s estimated 26.5 percent share of the US digital ad market is down more than 10 percent from its peak in 2015, due to the growth of Meta and Amazon.
• The lawsuit claims that Google’s fees on its ad exchanges allow it to keep 30 cents out of every dollar spent on them, resulting in overcharges of $100 million for federal agencies.
• The case is rooted in real harms and is in line with traditional thinking about the point of antitrust law, which is to protect consumers.
Published January 25, 2023
Visit Platformer to read Casey Newton’s original post Google’s most serious antitrust challenge to date
