It’s official… the moment we knew was probably coming. The United States is suing one of its biggest innovators and value generators at the center of the tech sector: Google. Today the U.S. Department of Justice fired this shot with a new suit that’s been filed against Google over alleged antitrust behavior.
The DOJ claims that the search giant has gained and exercised monopoly control over the digital advertising market. Specifically, it claims that Google’s suite of online advertising tools prevents competitors from entering the online ad market and blocks publishers from monetizing content.
Ep. 7 of This Week in Local Features Andrew Shotland on Open AI & ChatGPT
Local Levels
That last part is a well-worn complaint about Google as it increasingly fills its search engine results pages (SERPS) with its own results, rather than links to others. This complaint applies on local levels, as players such as Yelp have long argued that its results are increasingly pushed out of Google SERPS.
According to the complaint:
One industry behemoth, Google, has corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising. Having inserted itself into all aspects of the digital advertising marketplace, Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies.
Tinkering with SERPs alone isn’t illegal, as Google has exercised innovation and rigor in becoming a market-leading platform that everyone wants to use… and it can design its product as it sees fit. The monopoly designation factors in when it uses that position of dominance to stifle competition.
And that’s where this DOJ suit lies, claiming that Google illegally uses monopoly power. And it claims that the only way to solve that problem is to break up Google by forcing it to divest components that allow it to carry out that offending behavior. So if the DOJ gets its way, Google will go the way of Ma Bell.
Adequately Competitive
Meanwhile, Google not surprisingly claims that it hasn’t acted illegally and that the digital ad market is adequately competitive. It often points to competitors such as Meta and Amazon while making this case (which carries less weight today, at least for the former). TikTok has recently joined this list.
The groundwork on this suit has been carrying on in the background since late 2001, with several clues that it was underway. So it’s not a complete surprise, though it’s still a landmark event. Eight states join the federal entity in this complaint, including New York, California, Colorado, and a handful of others.
We’ll keep watching for developments and the ripple effects this will likely have on local search.
