The Department of Justice of the United States has filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the technology giant Google for monopoly in the advertising sector, for which it has demanded that the Court of the Eastern District of Virginia force the company to spin off part of its advertising business. .
The lawsuit is led by the Department of Justice, although the states of Virginia, California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Tennesse have joined the legal action.
“Competition in the ad-tech space is broken, for reasons that have not been accidental or unavoidable. An industry behemoth, Google, has corrupted legitimate competition in the ad-tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of a wide range of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers and brokers to facilitate digital advertising,” the plaintiffs have charged.
Prosecutors in these states have accused Google of keeping “at least” 30 percent of the campaigns that advertisers place on publishers’ websites through its ad technology.
In this sense, the United States has asked the Court to force Google to sell Google Ad Manager, including its ad server, the Double Click range of tools and the AdX ad buying and selling platform, “at a minimum”.
This is the second lawsuit that the Justice Department has filed against Google. In 2020, the agency already began legal proceedings against the technology company, alleging that it had engaged in monopolistic practices to dominate the Internet search sector, as well as advertising in said searches.
