Alexandria, Virginia – On Monday, The Google Monopoly trial begins. Open Markets and Center for Journalism and Liberty senior reporter Karina Montoya will be in Alexandria, Virginia, covering Day 1 of the trial to determine whether Google has illegally monopolized the U.S. digital advertising market, as the Department of Justice and 17 U.S. states have charged.
The Attorneys General of Arizona, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Washington, and West Virginia have joined a civil antitrust lawsuit initiated by the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. This lawsuit also includes the participation of the Attorneys General of California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Virginia.
For both news publishers and advertisers, a win for the plaintiffs in the Google Monopoly trial could usher in a radically different future for the internet, since many of the technologies powering ad sales have long been under the stranglehold of a single corporation: Google.
The trial is expected to last between four to six weeks, and Montoya will cover all of it.
As a senior reporter at the Center for Journalism and Liberty at Open Markets, Montoya will cover the trial primarily from the lens of the ways in which Google’s monopolization of online advertising has fueled the crisis for news and journalism.
You can read Montoya’s detailed explainer on the case, and the relationship between digital advertising markets and the news business and the specific charges brought against Google here. Namely, the DOJ’s lawsuit shows that Google has used its dominance to both unfairly siphon off advertising revenue from news publishers (and pick winners and losers) and to try and lock publishers into using Google’s advertising technologies by:
The Google Monopoly Trial
- Leveraging their market dominance to charge news publishers consistently high fees.
- Controlling which news publishers receive a bigger cut of each dollar spent on advertising.
- Reducing ad dollar payments to publishers to punish and deter them from using rival ad tech platforms.
At its core, the complaint reveals that Google’s monopolistic behavior hamstringed its rivals’ abilities to compete on the merits. In turn, this strategy gave Google near total control of ad spending distribution across the web and the ability to keep its high fees unchallenged.
MyrtleBeachSC News will be following the Google Monopoly trial ongoing.