By Jody Godoy and David Shepardson
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department told a federal judge that Google is illegally dominating online advertising technology as it seeks a second antitrust victory against the company.
The closing arguments in Alexandria, Virginia cap a 15-day trial held in September in which prosecutors sought to show that Google monopolized the markets for publishers’ ad servers and advertisers’ ad networks, and attempted to control the market for ad exchanges between dominate buyers and sellers.
“Google has manipulated the rules of the road,” said DOJ attorney Aaron Teitelbaum, who asked the judge to hold Google accountable for anticompetitive conduct, adding that Google is “a monopolist once, twice, three times over.”
Another DOJ attorney Julia Tarver Wood compared the case to Charles Dickens’ novel “A Tale of Two Cities” and said U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema should decide whether to give the DOJ or Google’s version of the state of the advertising market to take over.
Google attorney Karen Dunn said DOJ had failed to meet its legal obligations and asked Brinkema to ignore antitrust law and set aside important precedents. “The law simply does not support what the plaintiffs are alleging in this case,” Dunn said.
She argued that DOJ ignored Google’s legitimate business decisions and that the online advertising market was robust. The company claims that the government has singled out a small part of the online market and failed to take into account aggressive competition.
Alphabet shares rose 1.4% in afternoon trading.
Publishers said during the lawsuit that they couldn’t switch from Google, even as Google rolled out features they didn’t like, because there was no other way to access the massive ad demand within Google’s ad network.
News Corp estimated in 2017 that the company would have lost at least $9 million in advertising revenue that year if it had switched, a witness said.
If Brinkema finds that Google broke the law, she would consider the plaintiff’s request to at least let Google sell Google Ad Manager, a platform that includes the publisher’s ad server and the Ad Exchange.
Google offered this year to sell the Ad Exchange to end an EU antitrust investigation, but European publishers rejected the proposal as insufficient, Reuters first reported in September.
Analysts see the ad tech case as a smaller financial risk than the case in which a judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly in online search and in which prosecutors have argued that the company should be forced to sell its Chrome browser.
(Reporting by Jody Godoy in New York and David Shepardson in Alexandria, Virginia; Editing by Nick Zieminski, Jonathan Oatis and Chizu Nomiyama)
