(Bloomberg) — A federal judge threw cold water on one of Alphabet Inc.’s key arguments in a Department of Justice lawsuit over allegations that Google monopolized advertising technology.
Most Read from Bloomberg
During closing arguments in the lawsuit against the tech giant, US District Judge Leonie Brinkema said that she disagreed with Google’s attempts to rely on an earlier antitrust case involving American Express Co. The judge interrupted Google’s lawyer Monday to say that she had carefully studied a 2018 Supreme Court decision in the older case.
“We’re dealing with a completely different setup” here compared to Amex, she said on the closing day of the trial in Alexandria, Virginia.
The case is one of several against Google over antitrust issues. In another, the Justice Department is seeking to force Alphabet to sell off its Chrome browser after winning a landmark ruling that company illegally monopolized online search.
In Monday’s case, the Justice Department and a group of states sued Google in 2023, arguing the company illegally monopolized three separate markets for advertising technology: sell-side tools used by websites, called ad servers; advertising exchanges; and buy-side tools used by advertisers known as ad networks. The company has countered by saying that splitting its tools into those buckets is wrong and its business is better understood as a single market in which website publishers and advertisers transact.
Brinkema’s interjection came as Google lawyers were citing the American Express case, where the Supreme Court ruled that judges should look at how a product or service impacts different groups of customers. Google argues that some of its conduct — which the Justice Department said harmed website publishers — can be justified because it was intended to help advertisers.
Brinkema said she has “problems” applying the ruling related to the credit card market to Google.
But Google’s lawyer, Karen Dunn, argued that the company’s ad tech tools serve a similar function to credit cards by seeking to “match” buyers and sellers of online ads.
The tools act to “facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers,” she said. You “can’t look at one side in isolation.”
Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Justin Teresi, who attended Monday’s arguments, said he believes Brinkema will rule in favor of the government based on a different legal argument.
