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Today, Google and the Justice Department are set to go head-to-head on whether Google’s dominance in digital advertising is monopolistic — a verdict that could radically change the market and give competitors a chance.
The Big Picture: The ad market trial comes just weeks after the DOJ prevailed in its case against Google that its search market power was a monopoly. A second win would put a lot of wind in the DOJ’s sails to aggressively go after other tech giants.
Between the Lines: Lawyers for Google and the DOJ are set to plead their cases to a federal judge in Virginia. Here are the arguments:
- The DOJ says that Google’s command over the buying and selling of ads (and the tech that makes it all possible) has shut out competitors, helped it raise prices, and allowed it to institute self-dealing changes across the ad ecosystem for the past 15 years.
- Google says that the DOJ’s lawsuit aims to punish the company for making tools and processes that are efficient, beneficial, and user-friendly. Also, it says the agency isn’t taking into account other competitive factors, or the company’s ad market innovations.
Closing Thoughts: The ad market and the technologies that support it are complicated, but what the DOJ is trying to get across, according to Vanderbilt Law School antitrust professor Rebecca Haw Allensworth, is that vertical integration — controlling the supply chain of how things are bought and sold — is inherently monopolistic. If successful, the potential breakup of Google could be even more expansive than previously thought.
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