One month after a judge declared Google’s search engine an illegal monopoly, the tech giant faces another antitrust lawsuit that threatens to break up the company, this time over its advertising technology.
The Justice Department, joined by a coalition of states, and Google each made opening statements Monday to a federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, who will decide whether Google holds a monopoly over online advertising technology.
The regulators contend that Google built, acquired and maintains a monopoly over the technology that matches online publishers to advertisers. Dominance over the software on both the buy side and the sell side of the transaction enables Google to keep as much as 36 cents on the dollar when it brokers sales between publishers and advertisers, the government contends.
I like Google’s weak argument that technology has shifted to mobile so advertising is different than it was before, and therefore they can’t have a monopoly. Because they’re not arguing that they don’t have monopoly, they’re arguing that the monopoly is less impactful. But if that’s true, then forcing them to split companies isn’t such a big deal, because surely they as a company have similarly shifted in focus, so they would only be losing a piece of their total advertising branch, not the whole thing.