Google is a monopoly in online ad tech, federal judge rules

A federal judge has ruled that Google is a monopolist in online advertising. The New York Times reported on Thursday that Judge Leonie Brinkema of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said the company broke the law to maintain its ad tech dominance. “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. The case stemmed from a January 2023 lawsuit from the US Justice Department and eight states. They accused Google of illegally monopolizing the ad market and using that power to charge more and take a higher portion of sales. ADVERTISEMENT Advertisement "Competition in the ad tech space is broken, for reasons that were neither accidental nor inevitable," the government said in its complaint. "One industry behemoth, Google, has corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industr ... Read full article.