Google faces a September trial after the Justice Department asked a federal judge on Friday to force the Big Tech giant to dump parts of its monopolistic digital promoting business.
US District Judge Leonie Brinkema set the Sept. 22 trial date after hearing initial treatment proposals from the DOJ and Google. Last month, the judge ruled that Google operates two separate illegal monopolies within the digital promoting technology which have “substantially harmed” customers.
DOJ attorneys said Google should divest its publisher ad server business, in addition to its lucrative ad-exchange market that connects ad buyers to sellers. The publisher ad servers are utilized by web sites to store and manage their digital ad inventory.
Federal attorney Julia Tarver Wood said the forced sale would likely take several years to finish. Google also needs to be required to share real-time promoting data with its competitors, based on the feds.
Google’s legal team pushed back in court, arguing that a forced sale was not permitted under the law and that proceeding with the plan would hurt relatively than help the digital ad market.
In her ruling last month, Brinkema determined that Google damaged online news publishers and US consumers alike by utilizing anticompetitive practices to regulate the method by which ads are placed on web sites.
“Along with depriving rivals of the flexibility to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of knowledge on the open web,” the judge said in her ruling.
Google has already vowed to appeal.
The digital promoting case is only one legal headache for Google, which was found to have an illegal monopoly over online search in a separate DOJ case.
The DOJ has asked US District Judge Amit Mehta to force Google to sell its Chrome web browser in that case, in addition to share search data with rivals. Mehta is currently considering the proposal in an ongoing treatment trial, with a final decision expected by August.
Each cases have the potential to upend Google’s entire business model.
With Post wires
