The U.S. Government Begins Making Its Case Against Google’s Ad Business ⇥ reuters.com

Google, fresh from being found to have an illegal monopoly in search, is now facing another trial over its dominance in internet advertising.

Jody Godoy, Reuters:

Prosecutors say Google has largely dominated the technological infrastructure that funds the flow of news and information on websites through more than 150,000 online ad sales every second.

Google used classic monopoly-building tactics of eliminating competitors through acquisitions, locking customers into using its products, and controlling how transactions occurred in the online ad market, Julia Tarver Wood, an attorney with the Justice Department’s antitrust division, said in an opening statement.

“Google is not here because they are big, they are here because they used that size to crush competition,” she said.

Allison Schiff, AdExchanger:

As one ad tech executive close to the trial told AdExchanger on background, learning more about Project Poirot and Project Bernanke was like discovering “all that stuff we hear about late at night at the bar was really real.”

Many people seem to have taken for granted that it is natural for a marketplace as vast and as borderless as the internet provides to be so largely dominated by a small handful of parties in any given domain. Perhaps this is actually how things ought to shake out. But perhaps it is also right for governments to test this theory. It may take a while for legal efforts to bear fruit — Google’s lawyer called it a “time capsule” — and even longer for the power of these giant businesses to wane. That does not mean it is misguided to understand whether the behaviour of giants like Apple, Google, and Meta has been legal.