Google has asked a Virginia Federal Court in the United States to throw out a lawsuit filed against it by the Department Justice (DOJ), which accuses the company of monopolising ad tech.
Recall that Google was sued by the DOJ in January 2023 for allegedly engaging in “anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct” to monopolize digital advertising technologies.
“Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful conduct to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies,” according to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland at the time the complaint was first announced.
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According to a statement from the agency last year, the complaint claims that Google controls digital advertising tools to the point where it “pockets on average more than 30 percent of the advertising dollars that flow through its digital advertising technology products.”
In order to prevent the lawsuit from proceeding to trial in September as scheduled, the search engine giants are now requesting summary judgment, according to Bloomberg.
Google now contends that the DOJ “made up markets specifically for this case” and that the agency hasn’t demonstrated that the business owns at least 70% of the market, which has been used as the bar in some other cases to qualify as a monopoly.