10 US states sue Google for ‘anti-competitive’ online ad sales

In United States, ten states brought a lawsuit against Google, accusing the search giant of “anti-competitive conduct” in the online advertising industry, including a deal to manipulate sales with rival Facebook. Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the suit, which was filed in a federal court in Texas, saying Google is using its “monopolistic power” to control pricing of online advertisements, fixing the market in its favor and eliminating competition“This Goliath of a company is using its power to manipulate the market, destroy competition, and harm you, the consumer,” Paxton said in the video posted on Twitter.

Google, which is based in Mountain View, California, called Paxton’s claims “meritless” and said the price of online advertising has fallen over the last decade. “These are the hallmarks of a highly competitive industry,” the company said in statement. “We will strongly defend ourselves from (Paxton’s) baseless claims in court.”Paxton led a bipartisan coalition of 50 U.S. states and territories that announced in September 2019 they were investigating Google’s business practices, citing “potential monopolistic behavior.”

Texas is bringing the suit along other Republican attorneys general from Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota and Utah. The complaint targets the heart of Google’s business — the digital ads that generate nearly all of its revenue, as well as all the money that its corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., depends upon to help finance a range of far-flung technology projects. As more marketers have increased their spending online, those digital ads have turned Google into a moneymaking machine. Through the first nine months of this year, Google’s ad sales totaled nearly $101 billion, accounting for 86% of its total revenue.

“Google has an appetite for total dominance, and its latest ambition is to transform the free and open architecture of the internet,” the suit alleges. In the “ad tech” marketplace that brings together Google and a huge universe of online advertisers and publishers, the company controls access to the advertisers that put ads on its dominant search platform. Google also runs the auction process for advertisers to get ads onto a publisher’s site. Nine of Google’s products in search, video, mobile, email, mapping and other areas are estimated to have over a billion users each, providing the company a trove of users’ data that it can deploy in the advertising process. Google officials say the company shares the majority of its “ad tech” revenue with publishers, such as newspaper websites.