The U.S. Department of Justice and eight states have filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of monopolising the market for digital advertisements.
“We allege that Google has used anti-competitive, exclusionary and unlawful conduct to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies,” said the U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in an announcement on Tuesday.
To curtail Google’s monopoly over the digital sphere, the American government prayed the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to order the tech giant to sell some of of its digital advertising products.
“One industry behemoth, Google, has corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising,” the suit further alleged.
The U.S. government accused Google of linking technology tools such as publish ad server, advertiser ad network and ad exchange as a ploy to keep controlling the digital advertising market
The eight states that joined the antitrust suit against Google are Virginia, California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Tennessee.