Report from the Wall Street Journal
In Brief – In the latest in a string of major antitrust setbacks, US District Judge Leonie Brinkema largely sided with the Department of Justice (DoJ) and ruled that Google violated federal monopoly law in the operation of their adtech businesses that serve display advertising to major publisher websites. In her opinion, the judge wrote, “this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web.” Brinkema did reject the DoJ claim that Google unlawfully monopolized the adtech services market for advertisers to place their display ads across the open web. Google’s vice-president for regulatory affairs backed the judge’s finding on advertiser tools, saying, “We won half of this case, and we will appeal the other half.” Like in its other recent antitrust court setbacks involving its massive general search service and the operation of its Android Play Store, Google was harshly criticized for internal document policies that led to its employees and executives frequently deleting internal chat records and mislabeling communications under attorney-client privilege, with Brinkema warning Google that she believed the company had probably destroyed evidence and that it could be a “very serious” problem for its credibility in the trial.
Context – Like in the Meta antitrust trial that will hinge on defining social media markets, determining relevant markets and the share and dominance of the alleged monopolist proved key in this case. eMarketer says Google tops the overall US digital ads space but with just a 23.9% share, while Meta holds 20.9% and Amazon 17.3 percent. Prosecutors instead successfully focused on various online advertising subsectors, including arguing that almost 90 percent of online publishers use Google to source their websites’ display ads. Like in the federal antitrust case challenging Google’s search dominance, where District Judge Amit Mehta will weigh DoJ’s request to break the Chrome browser out of Google, Brinkema will now preside over a trial to determine remedies, which could result in a restructuring of its immense ad business as well.