Google is requesting summary judgment in order to prevent the case from going to trial in September as planned. According to Bloomberg, Google filed a motion on Friday in a federal court in Virginia asking for the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against it to be dismissed. The DOJ sued Google in January 2023, alleging the company of monopolizing digital advertising technologies through “anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct.”
Google “has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful conduct to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies,” according to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland at the time the complaint was initially announced. According to a news statement from the agency last year, the complaint claims that Google dominates digital advertising tools to the point where it “pockets on average more than 30 percent of the advertising dollars that flow through its digital advertising technology products.”
Google now argues that that the DOJ hasn’t shown that the company controls at least 70 percent of the market, which some previous cases have used as the threshold for qualifying as a monopoly, and that the agency “made up markets specifically for this case,” according to Bloomberg, excluding its major competitors like social media platforms. The company also claims the DOJ’s case goes “beyond the boundaries of antitrust law”.
