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Tag: monopoly

  • Judge to hear arguments on whether Google’s advertising tech constitutes a monopoly

    Judge to hear arguments on whether Google’s advertising tech constitutes a monopoly

    ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Google, already facing a possible breakup of the company over its ubiquitous search engine, is fighting to beat back another attack by the U.S. Department of Justice alleging monopolistic conduct, this time over technology that puts online advertising in front of consumers.

    The Justice Department and Google are scheduled to make closing arguments Monday in a trial alleging Google’s advertising technology constitutes an illegal monopoly.

    U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, will decide the case and is expected to issue a written ruling by the end of the year. If Brinkema finds Google has engaged in illegal, monopolistic conduct, she will then hold further hearings to explore what remedies should be imposed.

    The Justice Department, along with a coalition of states, has already said it believes Google should be forced to sell off its ad tech business, which generates tens of billions of dollars annually for the Mountain View, California-based company.

    After roughly a month of trial testimony earlier this year, the arguments in the case remain the same.

    The Justice Department contends Google built and maintained a monopoly in “open-web display advertising,” essentially the rectangular ads that appear on the top and right-hand side of the page when one browses websites.

    Google dominates all facets of the market: A technology called “DoubleClick” is used pervasively by news sites and other online publishers, while “Google Ads” maintains a cache of advertisers large and small looking to place their ads on the right webpage in front of the right consumer.

    In between is another Google product, AdExchange, that conducts nearly instantaneous auctions matching advertisers to publishers.

    In court papers, Justice Department lawyers say Google “is more concerned with acquiring and preserving its trifecta of monopolies than serving its own publisher and advertiser customers or winning on the merits.”

    As a result, content providers and news organizations have never been able to generate the online revenue they should due to Google’s excessive fees for brokering transactions between advertisers and publishers, the government says.

    Google argues the government’s case improperly focuses on a narrow niche of online advertising. If one looks more broadly at online advertising to include social media, streaming TV services, and app-based advertising, Google says it controls only 25% of the market, a share that is dwindling as it faces increased and evolving competition.

    Google alleges in court papers that the government’s lawsuit “boil(s) down to the persistent complaints of a handful of Google’s rivals and several mammoth publishers.”

    Google also says it has invested billions in technology that facilitates the efficient match of advertisers to interested consumers and it should not be forced to share its technology and success with competitors.

    “Requiring a company to do further engineering work to make its technology and customers accessible by all of its competitors on their preferred terms has never been compelled by U.S. antitrust law,” the company wrote.

    The Virginia case is separate from an ongoing lawsuit brought against Google in the District of Columbia over its namesake search engine. In that case, the judge determined the search engine constitutes an illegal monopoly but has not decided what remedy to impose.

    The Justice Department said last week it will seek to force Google to sell its Chrome Web browser, among a host of other penalties. Google has said the department’s request is overkill and unhinged from legitimate regulation.

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  • US regulators seek to break up Google, forcing Chrome sale as part of monopoly punishment

    US regulators seek to break up Google, forcing Chrome sale as part of monopoly punishment

    U.S. regulators want a federal judge to break up Google to prevent the company from continuing to squash competition through its dominant search engine after a court found it had maintained an abusive monopoly over the past decade.

    The proposed breakup floated in a 23-page document filed late Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Justice calls for sweeping punishments that would include a sale of Google’s industry-leading Chrome web browser and impose restrictions to prevent Android from favoring its own search engine.

    Although regulators stopped short of demanding Google sell Android too, they asserted the judge should make it clear the company could still be required to divest its smartphone operating system if its oversight committee continues to see evidence of misconduct.

    The broad scope of the recommended penalties underscores how severely regulators operating under President Joe Biden’s administration believe Google should be punished following an August ruling by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta that branded the company as a monopolist.

    The Justice Department decision-makers who will inherit the case after President-elect Donald Trump takes office next year might not be as strident. The Washington, D.C. court hearings on Google’s punishment are scheduled to begin in April and Mehta is aiming to issue his final decision before Labor Day.

    If Mehta embraces the government’s recommendations, Google would be forced to sell its 16-year-old Chrome browser within six months of the final ruling. But the company certainly would appeal any punishment, potentially prolonging a legal tussle that has dragged on for more than four years.

    Google didn’t have an immediate comment about the filing, but has previously asserted the Justice Department is pushing penalties that extend far beyond the issues addressed in its case.

    Besides seeking a Chrome spinoff and a corralling of the Android software, the Justice Department wants the judge to ban Google from forging multibillion-dollar deals to lock in its dominant search engine as the default option on Apple’s iPhone and other devices. It would also ban Google from favoring its own services, such as YouTube or its recently-launched artificial intelligence platform, Gemini.

    Regulators also want Google to license the search index data it collects from people’s queries to its rivals, giving them a better chance at competing with the tech giant. On the commercial side of its search engine, Google would be required to provide more transparency into how it sets the prices that advertisers pay to be listed near the top of some targeted search results

    The measures, if they are ordered, threaten to upend a business expected to generate more than $300 billion in revenue this year.

    “The playing field is not level because of Google’s conduct, and Google’s quality reflects the ill-gotten gains of an advantage illegally acquired,” the Justice Department asserted in its recommendations. “The remedy must close this gap and deprive Google of these advantages.”

    It’s still possible that the Justice Department could ease off attempts to break up Google, especially if Trump takes the widely expected step of replacing Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, who was appointed by Biden to oversee the agency’s antitrust division.

    Although the case targeting Google was originally filed during the final months of Trump’s first term in office, Kanter oversaw the high-profile trial that culminated in Mehta’s ruling against Google. Working in tandem with Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, Kanter took a get-tough stance against Big Tech that triggered other attempted crackdowns on industry powerhouses such as Apple and discouraged many business deals from getting done during the past four years.

    Trump recently expressed concerns that a breakup might destroy Google but didn’t elaborate on alternative penalties he might have in mind. “What you can do without breaking it up is make sure it’s more fair,” Trump said last month. Matt Gaetz, the former Republican congressman that Trump nominated to be the next U.S. Attorney General, has previously called for the breakup of Big Tech companies.

    Gaetz, a firebrand for Trump, faces a tough confirmation hearing.

    This latest filing gave Kanter and his team a final chance to spell out measures that they believe are needed to restore competition in search. It comes six weeks after Justice first floated the idea of a breakup in a preliminary outline of potential penalties.

    But Kanter’s proposal is already raising questions about whether regulators seek to impose controls that extend beyond the issues covered in last year’s trial, and — by extension — Mehta’s ruling.

    Banning the default search deals that Google now pays more than $26 billion annually to maintain was one of the main practices that troubled Mehta in his ruling.

    It’s less clear whether the judge will embrace the Justice Department’s contention that Chrome needs to be spun out of Google and or Android should be completely walled off from its search engine.

    “It is probably going a little beyond,” Syracuse University law professor Shubha Ghosh said of the Chrome breakup. “The remedies should match the harm, it should match the transgression. This does seem a little beyond that pale.”

    Trying to break up Google harks back to a similar punishment initially imposed on Microsoft a quarter century ago following another major antitrust trial that culminated in a federal judge deciding the software maker had illegally used his Windows operating system for PCs to stifle competition.

    However, an appeals court overturned an order that would have broken up Microsoft, a precedent many experts believe will make Mehta reluctant to go down a similar road with the Google case.

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  • Google begins its defense in antitrust case alleging monopoly over advertising technology

    Google begins its defense in antitrust case alleging monopoly over advertising technology

    ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.

    “The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years,” said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company’s first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.

    The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.

    Google counters that the government’s case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google’s lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.

    Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.

    Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.

    The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent publishers from making as much money as they otherwise could for selling their ad space.

    It also says that Google’s technology, when used on all facets of an ad transaction, allows Google to keep 36 cents on the dollar of any particular ad purchase, billions of which occur every single day.

    Executives at media companies like Gannett, which publishes USA Today, and News Corp., which owns the Wall Streel Journal and Fox News, have said that Google dominates the landscape with technology used by publishers to sell ad space as well as by advertisers looking to buy it. The products are tied together so publishers have to use Google’s technology if they want easy access to its large cache of advertisers.

    The government said in its complaint filed last year that at a minimum Google should be forced to sell off the portion of its business that caters to publishers, to break up its dominance.

    In his testimony Friday, Sheffer explained how Google’s tools have evolved over the years and how it vetted publishers and advertisers to guard against issues like malware and fraud.

    The trial began Sept. 9, just a month after a judge in the District of Columbia declared Google’s core business, its ubiquitous search engine, an illegal monopoly. That trial is still ongoing to determine what remedies, if any, the judge may impose.

    The ad technology at question in the Virginia case does not generate the same kind of revenue for Goggle as its search engine does, but is still believed to bring in tens of billions of dollars annually.

    Overseas, regulators have also accused Google of anticompetitive conduct. But the company won a victory this week when a an EU court overturned a 1.49 billion euro ($1.66 billion) antitrust fine imposed five years ago that targeted a different segment of the company’s online advertising business.

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  • Going once, going twice: Google’s millisecond ad auctions are the focus of monopoly claim

    Going once, going twice: Google’s millisecond ad auctions are the focus of monopoly claim

    ALEXANDRIA, Va. — It happens in milliseconds, ideally, as you browse the web. Networks of computers and software analyze who you are, what you are looking at and buy and sell the advertisements you see on web pages.

    The company that most likely determines which ads you get, and how much an advertiser paid to get on your screen, is Google.

    In fact, the Justice Department and a coalition of states say Google’s dominance over the technology that controls the sale of billions of Internet display ads every day is so thorough that it constitutes an illegal monopoly that should be broken up.

    A trial under way in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, will determine if Google’s ad tech stack constitutes an illegal monopoly. The first week has included a deep dive into exactly how Google’s products work together to conduct behind-the-scenes electronic auctions that place ads in front of consumers in the blink of an eye.

    Online advertising has rapidly evolved. Fifteen or so years ago, if you saw an internet display ad, there was a pretty good chance it featured people dancing over their enthusiasm for low mortgage rates, and those ads were foisted on you whether you were looking at real estate or searching for baseball scores.

    Now, the algorithms that match ads to your interests are carefully calibrated, sometimes to an almost creepy extent.

    Google, for its part, says it has invested billions of dollars to improve the quality of ads that consumers see, and ensure that advertisers can reach the consumers they’re seeking.

    The Justice Department contends that what Google has also done over the years is rig the automated auctions of ad sales to favor itself over other would-be players in the industry, and also deprived the publishing industry of hundreds of millions of dollars it would have received if the auctions were truly competitive.

    Government witnesses have explained the auction process and how it has evolved over the years in detail at the Virginia trial.

    In the government’s depiction, there are three distinct tools that interact to sell an ad and place it in front of a consumer. There’s the ad servers used by publishers to sell space on their websites, particularly the rectangular ads that appear on the top and right-hand side of a web page. Ad networks are used by advertisers to buy ad space across an array of relevant websites.

    And in between is the ad exchange, which matches the website publisher to the would-be advertiser by hosting an instant auction.

    Publishers naturally want to receive as high a price as possible for their ad space, but testimony at trial has shown that didn’t always happen due to the rules Google imposed.

    For years, Google gave its ad exchange, called AdX, the first chance to match a publisher’s proposed floor price. For instance, if a publisher wanted to sell a specific ad impression for a minimum of 50 cents, Google’s software would give its own ad exchange the first chance to purchase. If Google’s ad exchange bid 50 cents, it would win the auction, even if competing ad exchanges down the line were willing to pay more.

    Google said the system was necessary to ensure ads loaded quickly. If the computers entertained bids from every ad exchange, it would take too long.

    Publishers, dissatisfied with this system, found a workaround to conduct the auctions outside of Google’s purview, a process that became known as “header bidding.” Internal Google documents introduced at trial described header bidding as an “existential threat” to Google’s market share.

    Google’s response relied on its control of all three components of the process. If publishers conducted an auction outside Google’s purview but they still used Google’s publisher ad server, called DoubleClick For Publishers, that software forced the winning bid back into Google’s Ad Exchange. If Google was willing to match the price that publishers had received under the header-bidding auction, Google would win the auction.

    Professor Ramamoorthi Ravi, an expert at Carnegie Mellon University, said rules imposed by Google failed to maximize value for publishers and “seem to have been designed to advantage Google’s own products.”

    Publishers could stop using Google’s ad exchange entirely, but at trial said they were reluctant to do so because then they would also lose access to Google’s huge, exclusive cache of advertisers in its Google Ads network, which was only available through Google’s ad exchange.

    Google, for its part, says it hasn’t run auctions this way since 2019, and that in the last five years Google’s share of the display ad market has begun to erode. It says that tying its buy side, sell side and middleman products together helps them run seamlessly and quickly, and minimizes fraudulent ads or malware risks.

    Google also says its innovations over the last 15 years fueled the improvements in matching online ads to consumer interests. Google says it was at the forefront of introducing “real-time bidding,” which allowed an advertiser selling shoes, for instance, to be paired up with a consumer whose online profile indicated an interest in purchasing shoes.

    Those innovations, according to Google, allowed publishers to sell their available ad space at a premium because the advertiser would know that the ad was going to the eyeballs of someone interested in their product or service.

    The Justice Department says that even though Google no longer runs its auctions in the ways described, it helped Google maintain its monopoly in the ad tech market in the years leading up to 2019, and that its existing monopoly allows Google to keep up to 36 cents on the dollar of every ad purchase it brokers when the transaction runs through all of its various products.

    The Virginia trial comes just a month after a judge in Washington ruling that Google’s search engine also constitutes an illegal monopoly. No decision in that case has been made on what, if any, remedies the judge will impose.

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  • Google faces new antitrust trial after ruling declaring search engine a monopoly

    Google faces new antitrust trial after ruling declaring search engine a monopoly

    ALEXANDRIA, Va. — One month after a judge declared Google’s search engine an illegal monopoly, the tech giant faces another antitrust lawsuit that threatens to break up the company, this time over its advertising technology.

    The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintains a monopoly over the technology that matches online publishers to advertisers. Dominance over the software on both the buy side and the sell side of the transaction enables Google to keep as much as 36 cents on the dollar when it brokers sales between publishers and advertisers, the government contends in court papers.

    Google says the government’s case is based on an internet of yesteryear, when desktop computers ruled and internet users carefully typed precise World Wide Web addresses into URL fields. Advertisers now are more likely to turn to social media companies like TikTok or streaming TV services like Peacock to reach audiences.

    In recent years, Google Networks, the division of the Mountain View, California-based tech giant that includes such services as AdSense and Google Ad Manager that are at the heart of the case, actually have seen declining revenue, from $31.7 billion in 2021 to $31.3 billion in 2023, according to the company’s annual reports.

    The trial over the alleged ad tech monopoly begins Monday in Alexandria, Virginia. It initially was going to be a jury trial, but Google maneuvered to force a bench trial, writing a check to the federal government for more than $2 million to moot the only claim brought by the government that required a jury.

    The case will now be decided by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who was appointed to the bench by former President Bill Clinton and is best known for high-profile terrorism trials including Sept. 11 defendant Zacarias Moussaoui. Brinkema, though, also has experience with highly technical civil trials, working in a courthouse that sees an outsize number of patent infringement cases.

    The Virginia case comes on the heels of a major defeat for Google over its search engine. which generates the majority of the company’s $307 billion in annual revenue. A judge in the District of Columbia declared the search engine a monopoly, maintained in part by tens of billions of dollars Google pays each year to companies like Apple to lock in Google as the default search engine presented to consumers when they buy iPhones and other gadgets.

    In that case, the judge has not yet imposed any remedies. The government hasn’t offered its proposed sanctions, though there could be close scrutiny over whether Google should be allowed to continue to make exclusivity deals that ensure its search engine is consumers’ default option.

    Peter Cohan, a professor of management practice at Babson College, said the Virginia case could potentially be more harmful to Google because the obvious remedy would be requiring it to sell off parts of its ad tech business that generate billions of dollars in annual revenue.

    “Divestitures are definitely a possible remedy for this second case,” Cohan said “It could be potentially more significant than initially meets the eye.”

    In the Virginia trial, the government’s witnesses are expected to include executives from newspaper publishers including The New York Times Co. and Gannett, and online news sites that the government contends have faced particular harm from Google’s practices.

    “Google extracted extraordinary fees at the expense of the website publishers who make the open internet vibrant and valuable,” government lawyers wrote in court papers. “As publishers generate less money from selling their advertising inventory, publishers are pushed to put more ads on their websites, to put more content behind costly paywalls, or to cease business altogether.”

    Google disputes that it charges excessive fees compared to its competitors. The company also asserts the integration of its technology on the buy side, sell side and in the middle assures ads and web pages load quickly and enhance security. And it says customers have options to work with outside ad exchanges.

    Google says the government’s case is improperly focused on display ads and banner ads that load on web pages accessed through a desktop computer and fails to take into account consumers’ migration to mobile apps and the boom in ads placed on social media sites over the last 15 years.

    The government’s case “focuses on a limited type of advertising viewed on a narrow subset of websites when user attention migrated elsewhere years ago,” Google’s lawyers write in a pretrial filing. “The last year users spent more time accessing websites on the ‘open web,’ rather than on social media, videos, or apps, was 2012.”

    The trial, which is expected to last several weeks, is taking place in a courthouse that rigidly adheres to traditional practices, including a resistance to technology in the courtroom. Cellphones are banned from the courthouse, to the chagrin of a tech press corps accustomed at the District of Columbia trial to tweeting out live updates as they happen.

    Even the lawyers, and there are many on both sides, are limited in their technology. At a pretrial hearing Wednesday, Google’s lawyers made a plea to be allowed more than the two computers each side is permitted to have in the courtroom during trial. Brinkema rejected it.

    “This is an old-fashioned courtroom,” she said.

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  • Judge gives US regulators until December to propose penalties for Google’s illegal search monopoly

    Judge gives US regulators until December to propose penalties for Google’s illegal search monopoly

    A federal judge on Friday gave the U.S. Justice Department until the end of the year to outline how Google should be punished for illegally monopolizing the internet search market and then prepare to present its case for imposing the penalties next spring.

    The loose-ended timeline sketched out by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta came during the first court hearing since he branded Google as a ruthless monopolist in a landmark ruling issued last month.

    Mehta’s decision triggered the need for another phase of the legal process to determine how Google should be penalized for years of misconduct and forced to make other changes to prevent potential future abuses by the dominant search engine that’s the foundation of its internet empire.

    Attorneys for the Justice Department and Google were unable to reach a consensus on how the time frame for the penalty phase should unfold in the weeks leading up to Friday’s hearing in Washington D.C., prompting Mehta to steer them down the road that he hopes will result in a decision on the punishment before Labor Day next year.

    To make that happen, Mehta indicated he would like the trial in the penalty phase to happen next spring. The judge said March and April look like the best months on his court calendar.

    If Mehta’s timeline pans out, a ruling on Google’s antitrust penalties would come nearly five years after the Justice Department filed the lawsuit that led to a 10-week antitrust trial last autumn. That’s similar to the timeline Microsoft experienced in the late 1990s when regulators targeted them for its misconduct in the personal computer market.

    The Justice Department hasn’t yet given any inkling on how severely Google should be punished. The most likely targets are the long-running deals that Google has lined up with Apple, Samsung, and other tech companies to make its search engine the default option on smartphones and web browsers.

    In return for the guaranteed search traffic, Google has been paying its partners more than $25 billion annually — with most of that money going to Apple for the prized position on the iPhone.

    In a more drastic scenario, the Justice Department could seek to force Google to surrender parts of its business, including the Chrome web browser and Android software that powers most of the world’s smartphones because both of those also lock in search traffic.

    In Friday’s hearing, Justice Department lawyers said they need ample time to come up with a comprehensive proposal that will also consider how Google has started to deploy artificial intelligence in its search results and how that technology could upend the market.

    Google’s lawyers told the judge they hope the Justice Department proposes a realistic list of penalties that address the issues in the judge’s ruling rather than submit extreme measures that amount to “political grandstanding.”

    Mehta gave the two sides until Sept. 13 to file a proposed timeline that includes the Justice Department disclosing its proposed punishment before 2025.

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