Google faces a September trial after the Justice Department asked a federal judge on Friday to force the Big Tech giant to sell off parts of its monopolistic digital advertising business.
US District Judge Leonie Brinkema set the Sept. 22 trial date after hearing initial remedy proposals from the DOJ and Google. Last month, the judge ruled that Google operates two separate illegal monopolies in the digital advertising technology that have “substantially harmed” customers.
DOJ attorneys said Google should divest its publisher ad server business, as well as its lucrative ad-exchange market that connects ad buyers to sellers. The publisher ad servers are used by websites to store and manage their digital ad inventory.
Federal attorney Julia Tarver Wood said the forced sale would likely take several years to complete. Google should also be required to share real-time advertising data with its competitors, according to the feds.
Google’s legal team pushed back in court, arguing that a forced sale was not permitted under the law and that proceeding with the plan would hurt rather than help the digital ad market.
In her ruling last month, Brinkema determined that Google damaged online news publishers and US consumers alike by using anticompetitive practices to control the process by which ads are placed on websites.
“In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web,” the judge said in her ruling.
Google has already vowed to appeal.
The digital advertising case is just one legal headache for Google, which was found to have an illegal monopoly over online search in a separate DOJ case.
The DOJ has asked US District Judge Amit Mehta to force Google to sell its Chrome web browser in that case, as well as share search data with rivals. Mehta is currently considering the proposal in an ongoing remedy trial, with a final decision expected by August.
Both cases have the potential to upend Google’s entire business model.
With Post wires
