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Google Is a Monopolist ... Again - The American Prospect
In 2019, a month into my tenure as executive editor at the Prospect, we published an investigation into digital ad markets. The author was Dina Srinivasan, a former executive with advertising giant WPP who saw the corruption of these markets from the inside. She argued that two Big Tech advertising companies, Google and Facebook, had commandeered these markets by relentlessly tracking users across the internet, running the auctions to match users with advertisers, and skimming a huge cut for themselves off the top, something publishers and advertisers could not escape.
“One way to unhook Facebook and Google’s business model over the public at large is through more competition,” Srinivasan wrote. She went on to advise Texas in an antitrust case, which argued that Google’s dominance of advertising technology allows it to rig auctions to benefit its products and extract from publishers. That case is still ongoing, but many of its allegations also appeared in a Justice Department lawsuit filed in 2023. And yesterday, Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled for the Justice Department, affirming that Google indeed had monopolized adtech markets in harmful ways.
It’s the third loss for Google in monopolization cases in the past 17 months. Next week, the remedy phase kicks off in the case that found Google liable of monopolizing search engine markets by paying for placement in devices and browsers. And in December 2023, a jury declared that Google ran illegal app store monopolies in a privately litigated case.
At the same time that the adtech verdict came down, the first week of arguments kicked off in Meta’s monopolization trial brought by the FTC, which among other things alleges that the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp allowed Meta to so dominate personal social networking that it could impose an “ad load tax” by stuffing more ads into user fees to make more money.
“One way to unhook Facebook and Google’s business model over the public at large is through more competition,” Srinivasan wrote. She went on to advise Texas in an antitrust case, which argued that Google’s dominance of advertising technology allows it to rig auctions to benefit its products and extract from publishers. That case is still ongoing, but many of its allegations also appeared in a Justice Department lawsuit filed in 2023. And yesterday, Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled for the Justice Department, affirming that Google indeed had monopolized adtech markets in harmful ways.
It’s the third loss for Google in monopolization cases in the past 17 months. Next week, the remedy phase kicks off in the case that found Google liable of monopolizing search engine markets by paying for placement in devices and browsers. And in December 2023, a jury declared that Google ran illegal app store monopolies in a privately litigated case.
At the same time that the adtech verdict came down, the first week of arguments kicked off in Meta’s monopolization trial brought by the FTC, which among other things alleges that the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp allowed Meta to so dominate personal social networking that it could impose an “ad load tax” by stuffing more ads into user fees to make more money.
https://prospect.org/economy/2025-04-18-google-court-antitrust-monopoly/
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