Will Google Hit the Monopoly Wall in Court Again

Transcript

00:00Will Google hit the monopoly wall in court again?

00:07A month has passed since a judge determined that Alphabet's Google has controlled a monopoly

00:12in the web search space.

00:14Now, the tech titan is returning to the legal battlefield to grapple with U.S. prosecutors

00:19for the second time over claims that the company's lucrative advertising business and technology

00:24have functioned as a monopoly, charging customers higher ad prices.

00:29While big tech could be getting its comeuppance, it might be at the expense of liberty.

00:34Google pursues world ad domination.

00:36Julia Tarver Wood, an attorney with the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, alleged

00:41that Google employed various monopoly-building strategies.

00:45According to its opening statement, the corporation eliminated competitors through acquisitions,

00:51controlled transactions in the online ad industry, and locked in advertisers and publishers to

00:56use its products.

00:58Google is not here because they are big, they are here because they use that size to

01:01crush competition, she said.

01:04Based on Reuters reporting at a court in Alexandria, Virginia, one monopoly is bad enough.

01:10But a trifecta of monopolies is what we have here.

01:13However, Google's lead attorney, Karen Dunn, shrugged off the accusations, telling the

01:19court that the case was based on ancient history.

01:23She likened the legal proceedings, which involved a coalition of several states and were launched

01:27on September 9, to a time capsule with a BlackBerry, an iPod, and a Blockbuster video card.

01:34In addition, Google is expected to assert that the Department of Justice's crusade will

01:39boost advertising costs, slow innovation, and harm businesses' efforts to attract eyeballs

01:44to their websites.

01:46Google is now manufacturing digital tools connecting to competitors' platforms as the

01:50digital ad space transitions to apps and streaming, the defense said.

01:55While its tech infrastructure facilitates thousands of online ad sales every second,

02:00annual corporate reports suggest the company's ad division has been slumping.

02:05From 2021 to 2023, Google Networks, comprised of AdSense and Google Ad Manager, reported

02:12revenues sliding from $31.7 billion in 2021 to $31.3 billion in 2023.

02:20The latest case comes soon after the tech juggernaut was defeated in the District of

02:24Columbia when a judge ruled that Google's search engine was a monopoly.

02:29The company achieved the same, the judge stated, by paying companies billions of dollars per

02:34year to lock in its products as the default search engine.

02:38In a December case, a separate judge concluded that Google's Android app store was a monopoly.

02:43Overseas, the European Union's top court agreed with a $2.64 billion fine that favored

02:49its native shopping search results over rival services, describing the practice as discriminatory.

02:56Court of Justice judges argued they wanted to prevent the maintenance or growth of competition

03:01in a market in which the degree of competition is already weakened, precisely because of

03:05the presence of one or more undertakings in a dominant position.