May 6 (UPI) — The U.S. Department of Justice said Google should divest two of its ad products after a ruling said it illegally acquired and kept a monopoly in the tech advertising sector.
On Monday, Justice Department officials urged a federal judge in Virginia in a late-night court filing to order Google to sell off its AdX exchange business and oversee a “phased” sale of its platform to unite publishers called DoubleClick for Publishers.
Last month, federal Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that Google willfully monopolized digital advertising in alleged violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, saying it harmed its publisher customers, the competitive process and U.S. consumers of online information.
“Plaintiffs have proven that Google has willfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts to acquire and maintain monopoly power in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets for open-web display advertising,” the ruling said.
The lawsuit was brought against Google by the federal government and 17 states.
On Monday, Google argued in its response that the sale of AdX and DFP was not “logistically unworkable” and held the position that products will not work beyond Google’s own software, adding that it would take “at the very minimum five years” but likely more to build a third party equivalent operation.
“By the time the new versions are created, the place and competitiveness of those tools in the highly dynamic ad tech industry may well be completely different than when divestiture was first ordered,” the global tech company wrote in its own court filing.
Meanwhile, a Google executive said Tuesday that the federal government’s legal remedies “go significantly beyond” court rulings.
“This would risk breaking a tool advertisers use to connect with publishers and efficiently reach their customers, and that app and video publishers use to monetize their content,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s VP of regulatory affairs, wrote in a blog post.
“Businesses that aren’t even part of the narrow market of ‘open web display ads’ at issue in this case,” she added.
Google, however, proposed a series of changes designed to “minimize disruptions,” like curating ad bids in real-time.
Meanwhile, Google has been under mounting pressure by the Justice Department and other international jurisdictions.
The U.S. government is asking a federal judge force Google to sell Chrome as part of a separate antitrust case that characterized Google as a monopoly.
It comes on top of an independent inquiry by the British Competition and Markets Authority into Apple and Google over the dominance of mobile web browsers and apps in Britain, which says the two tech leaders should be probed for alleged “anti-competitive behavior” in the digital marketplace.
Google and the Department of Justice will square off in September for legal remedy hearings.
