The Justice Department placed a roadmap on Friday to disband Google's ad technology empire. This will be the second request to force the business to be sold within a year.
The government's comments came at a hearing convened by Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. He ruled last month that Google dominated some of the vast system that puts ads on its website. She now has to decide on what is known as a relief measure. She should take to resolve her concerns.
Justice Department lawyers said they hope that the government will ask Google to force online publishers to sell their advertising space to Google. In the original lawsuit, the government asked the court to force Google to enforce ad technology it had acquired over the years.
“It's frankly too dangerous to try and see Google at them 90% of publishers,” says Julia Tarver Wood, the government's lead lawyer.
Google's lawyers said the dissolution was not consistent with previous legal precedents and puts privacy and security protections at risk.
The Justice Department's request is the latest legal blow to Google in the middle of a second hearing on how to improve monopoly on searches in federal courts in Washington. In that case, the government asked the judge to force the company to sell Chrome, a popular browser, along with other measures.
Combined, the two government demands (if granted) are most likely to represent the biggest reshaping of a strong company by the federal government since the 1980s, when AT&T was split into multiple companies as part of an antitrust settlement with the Department of Justice.
It remains to be seen whether judges will force a breakup that is considered the most extreme solution among antitrust experts.
In the AD Tech case filed in 2023, government lawyers argued that Google dominated the almost invisible technology that provides advertising to websites around the internet. The system runs an auction of open advertising spaces like news publishers, like news publishers, when pages are loaded.
The government claimed that Google had illegally dominated three parts of its system. It is the tool the website used to post open ad space, the tools that advertisers use to purchase it, and the software that connects two aspects of each transaction.
Judge Brinkema last month determined that Google had broken the law to protect its monopoly on publisher tools and software that connects with sellers of advertising space known as Advertising Exchange. The government has not proven that Google is the monopoly when it comes to the tools used by advertisers, she added.
At a hearing Friday, Judge Brenkema said he would call the hearing in September to determine the relief package.
To resolve concerns, the Justice Department said it plans to ask the judge to force Google to exchange ads.
The government also calls for the split of Google's publisher advertising tools by spinning some of them running auctions of advertising spaces and making their underlying coding available to the public. The government has since hoped that Google will sell tools that handle other features for publishers, such as record keeping.
Google's lead lawyer Karen Dunn said the plan would not adhere to legal precedents. She added that even if the court seriously considers disbanding Google's advertising technology business, the government's proposal is challenging.
There are few buyers in this technology, and the ones that can afford it are “huge tech companies.” Plus, the critical security and privacy protections offered by Google will disappear.
“It's very likely that what they're talking about is completely impossible,” she said without causing serious problems.
Instead, Google said it would require the company to change or abandon some of the practices the court said the government used to solidify its power, and take steps to open its ad auction bidding system in a way that would benefit publishers.
