The U.S. Department of Justice said it will try to force Google's parent letters to sell a key part of its digital advertising business, which constitutes an illegal monopoly.
The U.S. Department of Justice told federal judges Friday that the divestment of Google's advertising exchanges and publishers' advertising server business is the only way to break its dominance. The former is the largest market for online advertising space bidding, while the latter is the technology for online publishers to list and sell ads on their websites.
The Justice Department said in a Virginia court that the tech giant should also be required to share real-time advertising bid data with competitors. U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema set a September 22 trial date to hear proposals and Google's rebuttals.
Last month, Brinkema ruled against Google, finding it "deliberately" monopoly on the online advertising market by acquiring and bundling its advertising exchanges and publisher servers to keep competitors out and weakening them in pricing.
But she rejected part of the Justice Department case, saying it could not prove that Google unfairly dominated the third component of the market, the Advertising Network.
Google protested the ruling, saying it competes with online advertising spending by other technology groups such as Meta, Amazon and Tiktok. The company's attorneys said it is willing to share real-time advertising exchange data with competitors, but does not sell any part of its business.
"Other proposals from the Justice Department have forced our advertising technology tools to divest far beyond the court's findings, have no legal basis and will harm publishers and advertisers," said Lee-Anne Mulholland, head of regulatory affairs at Google.
AD Tech is the third antitrust case letter that was quickly lost. Last year, another judge found that it also became the default browser on its devices by paying Apple more than $20 billion in search range. The Justice Department has asked Google to sell its Chrome browser and share search data with its competitors.
CEO Sundar Pichai appeared in a Washington court in a search remedy trial Wednesday and considered the recommendations "far-reaching, extraordinary" and constituted the intellectual property that would be provided free of charge to competitors who could reverse search engines. He also said that sharing data can harm users' privacy.
Alphabet was also ordered to open its Android operating system to rivals after a San Francisco judge found its Google Play store suppressed competition in the app and charged too much.