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FollowingU.S. federal judge refuses to force Google to sell its online advertising exchange
On Wednesday, a U.S. federal judge refused to force Google to sell its online advertising exchange, saving the technology giant the harshest penalty previously sought by the Justice Department and winning Alphabet a key victory in a lost case.
Google was able to retain AdX
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia rejected the government's request that Google divest ownership of AdX. AdX is a trading platform where publishers can auction advertising space in real time. Publishers pay Google a 20% share of advertising sales.
The Ministry of Justice previously argued that forced sales are the most direct way to restore market competition. Google countered that divesting the trading platform would be technically complex and cumbersome and would put customers in a long and painful transition period. The technology giant also told the court that it had proactively proposed to sell AdX in settlement negotiations with European regulators and believed the Justice Department's request was too aggressive.
Judge Brinkema then sealed the ruling for 14 days so that both parties could apply for redactions of sensitive content. This means specific behavioral remedies will not be made public for about two weeks.
Modernity under a guilty verdict
The case, filed jointly by the federal government and multiple states in 2023, accuses Google of illegally protecting its monopoly on software used by publishers to serve ads and trading platforms that connect buyers and sellers of ads. States believe that Google has "locked" publishers into the AdX ecosystem through its ad servers.
In April this year, the court found that Google violated U.S. antitrust laws in the advertising technology market. However, the court did not agree that Google used the tools it built for advertisers to violate any laws, although it found that Google illegally locked publishers in its advertising exchange. The network business unit the Justice Department wants to divest accounted for about 12% of Alphabet's revenue at the time of the lawsuit.
Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google's vice president of regulatory affairs, said the company was "very pleased that the court rejected the Justice Department's proposal to break up tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow." The company has filed a separate appeal against the court's findings of fact.
Three major cases with few structural changes
This is the third consecutive time that the court has rejected the U.S. government's attempt to break up a large technology company. Last year, a Washington judge rejected the Federal Trade Commission's request for Meta to force the divestiture of Instagram and WhatsApp, ruling that the agency failed to prove that Meta had a monopoly on social media.
In Google's own search case, another judge refused to force the sale of Chrome, instead ordering the technology company to share search data and stop requiring partners to bundle apps.
This model raises a real question: whether courts have the ability to curb the monopolies of large technology companies. Google appears to have emerged largely unscathed from this series of legal uncertainties and has been able to focus on establishing a new front in artificial intelligence, and the current Justice Department appears to have no intention of obstructing the technology giant.
Compared with Europe, the U.S. approach seems quite relaxed. In recent years, EU regulators have issued more than US$10 billion in antitrust fines against Google, including a US$3.5 billion fine for advertising technology violations in September last year, a US$1.7 billion fine for advertising technology issues in 2019, and a US$4 billion fine maintained in 2022. billion in mobile business fines and a US$2.7 billion fine for search issues in 2017.
