Due to suspected anticompetitive behaviour in digital advertising, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Google last year.
On Friday, Google submitted a move to a federal court in Virginia, requesting that the antitrust lawsuit that the Department of Justice has launched against it be dismissed for lack of merit. In January of 2023, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Google, alleging that the firm had engaged in “anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct” in order to monopolise digital advertising technologies. According to Bloomberg, Google is currently attempting to obtain a summary judgement in order to prevent the matter from coming to trial as scheduled in September.
During the first announcement of the case, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland stated that Google “has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful conduct to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies.” This statement was made in response to the fact that Google did not comply with the law. Specifically, the lawsuit asserts that Google controls digital advertising tools to such an extent that it “pockets on average more than 30 percent of the advertising dollars that flow through its digital advertising technology products,” as stated in a press release issued by the agency in the previous year.
As of right now, Google is arguing that the Department of Justice has not demonstrated that the company controls at least seventy percent of the market. This is the threshold that has been used in some previous cases to determine whether or not a company is a monopoly. Additionally, Google claims that the DOJ “made up markets specifically for this case,” according to Bloomberg. This excludes the company’s major competitors, such as social media platforms. In addition, the corporation asserts that the Department of Justice’s case goes “beyond the boundaries of antitrust law,” as reported by Reuters.