The United States justice declares Google responsible of a double unlawful monopoly within the digital promoting market | Economy | EUROtoday

New Judicial Varapalo for Google. The decide in control of analyzing the lawsuit filed in 2023 by the Department of Justice and a bunch of states for dominant place in digital promoting has declared the corporate chargeable for exercising unlawful monopolistic practices. The sentence of federal decide Leonie Brinkema, 80, declares the corporate accountable in two of the three markets analyzed. Google was already declared in one other case for exercising an unlawful monopoly within the searches market. A brand new course of is now opened to research the measures to be imposed on the corporate.

“The plaintiffs have shown that Google has deliberately incurred a series of anti -competitive acts in order to acquire and maintain monopolistic power in advertising servers markets for editors and exchange of advertisements for graphic advertising on the open web,” says the sentence of 115 pages of Judge Brinkema.

“For more than a decade, Google has linked its advertising server for editors and its advertisement exchange platform through contractual policies and technological integration, which has allowed it to establish and protect its monopolistic power in these two markets. Google further consolidated its monopolistic power imposing anticompetitive policies to its customers and eliminating desirable characteristics of their products. In addition to depriving their rivals of their rivals Competing, this exclusive behavior substantially harmed Google’s client editors, to the competitive process and, ultimately, to information consumers on the open web, ”he concludes.

The decide, due to this fact, dictates that The firm violated the antimonopoly legislation in promoting trade markets and to instruments utilized by web sites to promote promoting areas, referred to as ads. In that sense, the corporate has additionally been discovered chargeable for the unlawful linking of the commercial server for Google editors, DFP (which is the evolution of Doublecick, which purchased in 2008 for 3.1 billion {dollars}), and the intermediation service, ADX. However, the decision states that the corporate doesn’t meet the definition of monopoly in a 3rd instrument market utilized by advertisers to purchase graphic adverts.

The choice additionally features a arduous reproach to the corporate of the Alphabet group for “the systematic breach by Google of the probative norms related to the destruction of evidence and its improper use of professional secrecy between lawyer and client”. The decide says that these behaviors “could be sanctionable”, however that, because the firm has been declared accountable, it isn’t essential to “punish Google for destruction of evidence at this time.” As within the case of searches, the decide clarifies, the choice to not sanction “should not be interpreted as an approval of the breach by Google of its obligation to keep the evidence”.

The plaintiffs ask for the division of the Google promoting enterprise via divestments to advertise competitors. However, the concrete measures to be adopted will probably be topic to a brand new course of with allegations of the events earlier than the ultimate judgment. According to the Department of Justice, Google Plan consisted, on the one hand, in neutralizing or eliminating rivals of promoting, actual or potential expertise, via a collection of acquisitions; And, on the opposite, in exercising their area in all digital promoting markets to power extra editors and advertisers to make use of their merchandise and, on the similar time, disturb their skill to make use of competitors merchandise.

That is the purpose the place the opposite case is extra severe, wherein Google was declared responsible of violating the antimonopoly legislation: the searches market. Prosecutors have requested that the corporate be compelled to promote its Chrome browser, to unlink its Android search engine and break the agreements with Apple and different corporations in order that its browsers use Google as a default search engine, amongst different treatments. The firm opposes it. A sentence is anticipated within the coming months.

The instances towards Google are a part of the offensive authorities of Joe Biden towards the monopolistic practices of huge corporations, specifically technological giants. In that battle, Lina Khan, head of the Federal Commerce Commission (FTC, in its English acronym) and the Department of Justice. The oral view of the FTC case towards Meta for the acquisition of Instagram has begun this week in Washington with the assertion as a witness of the corporate’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.