The Google ad tech case: U.S. et al. A federal court challenge to Google’s attempt to break up the search engine

The decision comes as Google and the DOJ are getting ready to meet in another federal court across the river in DC for the remedies phase of the search trial. The DOJ proposed to break up the search engine by forcing it to syndicate its search results, while spinning out its chrome browser.

Over the course of three weeks, the DOJ argued that Google illegally monopolized three separate markets in the ad tech space: that for publisher ad tools, advertiser ad networks, and the ad exchanges that facilitate transactions. They argued that tying together their publisher ad server and ad exchange was in violation of antitrust law. The government believes that Google collects profits at the expense of publishers and advertisers, who have worse experiences with no real alternatives.

The ad tech case — U.S. et al. An intricate web of programs that sell ad space around the web was the subject of a lawsuit filed against Google. The ads are placed by split-second auctions when a user loads a page. It generated over $30 billion in the next couple of years, which is a fraction of the revenue for the rest of the company.

“We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, said in a statement to The Verge. “The Court found that our advertiser tools and our acquisitions, such as DoubleClick, don’t harm competition. We disagree with the Court’s decision regarding our publisher tools. Publishers choose to use the ad tech tools of Microsoft and Apple, due to their affordability and effectiveness.

Google, on the other hand, argued that the government’s whole view of the market was contrived and not based in reality. Publishers and advertisers can work together to make money, because of the fact that they have different tools in different parts of the market. The government wants to dictate how the organization can do business and that’s why it has legitimate reasons for its behavior, they argued.