US DOJ wants to force sale of Google Ads Manager
Google is under fire in several concurrent lawsuits
US prosecutors want a judge to order the spin off of Google Ads Manager in a move that, if successful, would transform digital advertising globally.
Judge Leonie Brinkema – overseeing an antitrust adtech case against Google in Virginia – has already ruled that the search giant is operating an illegal monopoly in online advertising.
Judge Leonie Brinkema (supplied)
With the opening of the remedy phase of the case, Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers say they want Google’s ad marketplace, or other parts of its ad tech, to be taken away from Google parent Alphabet.
To avoid confusion: this case is different from the antitrust case concerning Google’s dominance in search, in which Judge Amit Mehta decided not to spin off the Chrome browser. Mehta handed down his ruling in August, in what was seen as largely a win for Google.
In the Brinkema case, a different aspect of Google’s gargantuan operation is under the microscope: the ad-tech stack. It was established in the first part of the trial that Google’s control over the tools that advertisers use to place ads (Google Ad Manager) and the ad exchange itself (AdX), had led to the illegal monopoly.
“Nothing short of a structural divestment is sufficient to bring meaningful change,” DOJ lawyer Julia Tarver Wood was reported as saying in opening remarks.
Google’s position is the DOJ request is extreme, unnecessary, and could break the market for digital advertising.
In the earlier search monopoly case, Judge Mehta ruled that the remedy of spinning off the Chrome browser did not address the core issue of the monopoly.
Observers have noted that this logic may not apply to the current case, and that it is open to Judge Brinkema to find that forcing Alphabet to sell a part of its ad product suite may be the logical solution to its ad tech dominance.
