According to legal experts, the U.S. government is likely to sue Google and force it to sell a portion of its advertising technology unit.
The complaint was filed in federal court in Virginia by the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division, and it mirrors allegations in another antitrust case brought against Google in federal court in New York by a Texas-led coalition of 17 states in 2020.
The complaint claims that Google monopolizes key digital advertising technologies, referred to collectively as the “ad tech stack,” on which website publishers rely to sell ads and advertisers rely to buy ads and reach potential customers.
The lawsuit also seeks to hold Google accountable for its long-standing monopolies in digital advertising technologies used by content creators to sell advertisements and advertisers to buy advertisements on the open internet.
Legal opinions have since been pouring in, and one is from New York University law professor Harry First who says, “the complaint has a degree of specificity that the other Google complaint does not,” “That indicates to me that they are very serious about actually changing the structure of Google’s ad tech business.”
Another is from Vanderbilt University law professor Rebecca Haw Allensworth who says, “To the extent that any federal court is going to be in the business of breaking up Google, it’s going to be a lot more comfortable doing that if the plaintiff is the federal government.”
The sources for this piece include an article in Reuters.