Officials with the Department of Justice (DOJ) have reportedly started to get ready to go after Google with a massive legal suit due to the tech titan’s extreme dominance throughout the digital advertising space.
The DOJ is currently expected to file this lawsuit in the court system by as soon as the end of the week, explained a few sources known to be close to the preparations to Bloomberg. This suit will be just the most recent in a long series of antitrust cases that have been slammed against the company by both state and federal government entities.
As of writing, Google has not yet chosen to release a statement on the reported legal maneuver coming from the DOJ, though the company has denied any and all allegations of monopolistic business practices many times before. As part of both court filings and testimonies that were filed in the past, the company has highlighted a few other companies such as Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon as top competitors in the digital ad space.
Google, which is owned by Alphabet Inc., sports the largest share of business throughout the $278.6 billion digital-ad market of the United States, as well as holding the top slot for the global digital ad market which sits at $626.86 billion.
The lawsuit reported by the DOJ is expected to go along the same lines as previous legal actions targeting the tech titan from 2020 — which had the department sue Google of the search practices of the company.
Then-Attorney General William Barr explained at that time that Google is the “gatekeeper of the Internet.”
“This lawsuit strikes at the heart of Google’s grip over the internet for millions of American consumers, advertisers, small businesses and entrepreneurs beholden to an unlawful monopolist,” he stated.
This past November, Google chose to settle a different legal challenge which was brought forth by a group of over a dozen states due to the company’s expansive use of location tracking software. Google then agreed to finalize things with a $391.5 million settlement with the attorneys general of 40 states that expressed that the company continued to monitor the movements of the nation even after they chose to turn off the location tracking feature for their phones.
“Consistent with improvements we’ve made in recent years, we have settled this investigation which was based on outdated product policies that we changed years ago,” expressed José Castañeda, a Google spokesman, via a release.
