While companies like Google have seen countless antitrust cases brought against them by the EU, the US Department of Justice has been much more lenient. After years of leniency, however, the situation is changing. Almost two and a half years after filing an antitrust case against Google for its dominance in search, the DOJ is bringing another antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet for abuse of dominance and monopoly through its online advertising platforms.

As reported by the New York Times, several states, including California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Virginia, have joined the US Department of Justice in the complaint. The lawsuit alleges that Google has stifled competition in advertising with “a systematic campaign to take control of the wide range of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers to facilitate digital advertising.”

If the plaintiffs ultimately win the case, Google may be forced to sell parts or all of its advertising business. For its part, Google claimed that the lawsuit filed by the Justice Department is “attempting to rewrite history” by targeting previously approved acquisitions. The post also highlights several of Google’s competitors in the advertising space, including Microsoft and TikTok. This case had been brewing for some time. In July 2022, Google reportedly offered to restructure its advertising business in an attempt to pacify Justice Department investigators, who at the time were focused on how Google was participating in its own ad auctions, giving it the ability to direct business to itself and away from competitors.

A case that will soon come to an end

The Mountain View company’s offer to the investigators was to separate the advertising business from Google Search while keeping ownership under the Alphabet umbrella. A pending lawsuit filed by the US DOJ against Google in October 2020 has held a tentative trial date of 12 September 2023 for over two years. That case will seek to determine whether the company has used its dominance in online search to hinder competition in the market with anti-competitive practices such as surprising deals to make it the default search provider in browsers, phones and smart speakers. Meanwhile, the Competition Committee of India fined Google more than $161 million for requiring device manufacturers to pre-install certain Google apps when they shipped Android phones. This decision was upheld in January 2023. To date, the European Union issued the largest fine against the search giant for a record EUR 4.1 billion over Android policies promoting the use of Google apps and services, a decision that Alphabet has appealed over the past two months.