Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some online advertising technology, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, adding to legal troubles that could reshape the $1.86 trillion company and alter its power over the internet.
Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said in a 115-page ruling that Google had broken the law to build its dominance over the largely invisible system of technology that places advertisements on pages across the web. The Justice Department and a group of states had sued Google, arguing that its monopoly in ad technology allowed the company to charge higher prices and take a bigger portion of each sale.
“In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web,” Judge Brinkema said.
The government argued in its case that Google had a monopoly over three parts of the online advertising market: the tools used by online publishers, like news sites, to host open ad space; the tools advertisers use to buy that ad space; and the software that facilitates those transactions.
Judge Brinkema ruled in the government’s favor in two of those, finding that Google illegally built a monopoly over the publisher tools and the software system. She dismissed the third, the tools used by advertisers, saying the government had failed to prove that it constituted a real and defined market.
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