The US government got a second chance to try to dismantle Google’s (GOOG, GOOGL) stronghold over the internet in a hearing on Friday meant to sort out how best to restore competition in two online advertising markets.
Judge Leonie Brinkema, a US federal district judge in Alexandria, Va., set a “remedies” trial date of Sept. 22 for the tech giant to face off against the Justice Department’s effort to break up Google’s ad tech monopoly.
Google now has to defend that part of its empire against a breakup while also doing the same in a separate antitrust trial where the DOJ is seeking the divestment of the tech giant’s Chrome search browser.
Last August, in that case, US District Judge Amit Mehta found Google liable for illegally monopolizing the general search engine market and the market for general search engine text.
He is now considering divestments of Google’s highly valuable Chrome browser and its Android operating system, along with limitations on its implementation of artificial intelligence tools.
In the ad tech monopoly case, Judge Brinkema in April sided with the DOJ and 17 state attorneys general by ruling that the tech giant used illegal tactics to block competition in markets where online advertisements are bought and sold.
That ruling gave the judge discretion to permit or deny the government’s request to consider divestments known as “structural remedies.”
Specifically, the DOJ has argued that Google’s Ad Manager suite, which includes DoubleClick for Publishers, a publisher-side ad server, and Google Ad Exchange, its exchange platform where buyers and sellers broker deals for online ads, should be spun off.
Google tried to get the judge to eliminate the option of divestitures. It was “going for a kill shot,” said Daniel McCuaig, a former trial attorney with the Justice Department’s antitrust division, who is now a partner with Cohen Milstein.
But Google didn’t get its way, which heightens its business risks as it fights to hold on to multiple subsidiaries in two major antitrust defeats suffered over the past year. However, Judge Brinkema did express concern about overreaching remedies during the hearing, noting that the wrong remedies can cause additional harm. Publishers, for example, may see no benefit if Google’s ad server were demolished.
Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president for regulatory affairs, said, “The DOJ’s additional proposals to force a divestiture of our ad tech tools go well beyond the Court’s findings, have no basis in law, and would harm publishers and advertisers.”
Google’s lawyers told the judge that divestiture should be excluded as a possible remedy and that the court should instead focus only on changing how the company operates its businesses. A company spokesperson added that divestitures would be an unprecedented remedy in the case, given that the court found the acquisitions did not harm competition.
McCuaig said that at the heart of the ad tech decision, Judge Brinkema found that Google enshrined its illegal monopoly by tying together its advertising technologies, which reinforced each other and allowed it to charge supracompetitive prices.
Ideally, he said, the government would likely want the two businesses sold off to different buyers.
Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick was reviewed and cleared by the US Federal Trade Commission by a four-to-one vote in 2007, based on its finding that the deal was unlikely to substantially lessen competition.
Alexis Keenan is a legal reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow Alexis on X @alexiskweed.
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