The United States Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Google on Tuesday, alleging that the tech giant abused monopoly power in the ad-tech industry, hurting web publishers and advertisers that try to use competing products.
The lawsuit asks the court to unwind Google's anticompetitive acquisitions and prevent the company from obtaining similar dominance in the future. Google has disputed these claims of anticompetitive behavior in the ad-tech market.
This is the second federal complaint against the tech giant. In 2020, the first complaint questioned Google's monopoly on search. The former lawsuit is scheduled to go to trial in September of this year.
In order to fend off a lawsuit last year, Google had offered to split parts of its ad-tech business into a separate company under the Alphabet umbrella.
According to Insider Intelligence, Google remains the market leader even when its share of US digital ads revenue has declined from 36.7 per cent in 2016 to 28.8 per cent last year.
In India, Google is in the top position with the Competition Commission of India. The competition regular had levied a fine of over 1,337 crore on Google for abusing its dominant position in India's Android smartphone operating system market. Google had called CCI's decision a copy of a European Commission decision.
In its legal filings, Google said that the CCI copy-pasted extensively from a European Commission decision, deploying evidence from Europe that was not examined in India. CCI's lawyer N Venkataraman told the apex court that the competition body's decision was not copied from anywhere.
Sundar Pichai-led tech company laid off more than 12,000 employees in a global downturn last week, due to a global economic slowdown.