Report from Reuters
In Brief – Google has won the dismissal of a proposed class action lawsuit from two news publishers that claimed it monopolized the online news market and exploited its dominance in internet search to extract publisher content without payment. In his ruling, US District Judge Amit Mehta rejected the claims lodged by the Helena World Chronicle and Emmerich Newspapers, saying that they failed to establish that Google had monopoly power in the online news market. The judge also ruled that the publishers did not have legal standing to maintain their lawsuit because their injuries were suffered in the online news market, not in the general search market where Google is dominant. Finally, Mehta said that the publishers’ claims that Google used mergers and acquisitions, such as for YouTube and Android, to bolster their alleged anticompetitive scheme, were filed more than a decade too late.
Context – As Google has lost major antitrust decisions, it has faced a growing number of “follow-on” civil antitrust lawsuits. For example, dozens of online comparison-shopping sites in Europe have filed lawsuits aiming to win damages from Google following the final resolution of the European Commission’s Google Shopping antitrust case. Klarna-owned Pricerunner is alone claiming $8 billion. Judge Mehta issued the landmark ruling in 2024 that Google’s general search service was a monopoly under US antitrust law. Local search platform Yelp, a leading critic of Google, has filed a civil antitrust lawsuit in US court that hopes to build on that ruling and find Google guilty of harming vertical search competitors, although that may prove a tough sell because Mehta himself rejected aspects of the original Google search case linked to claims of discrimination against vertical search services like Yelp. Canada-based Index Exchange, an AdTech firm, has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google in US federal court that aims to win damages based on US District Judge Leonie Brinkema’s April 2025 ruling that Google willfully maintained monopoly power in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets.