Google filed a motion Friday in federal court in Virginia seeking to dismiss the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against it. The In January 2023, it accused the company of monopolizing digital advertising technologies through “anti-competitive and exclusionary conduct”. Per Google is now seeking a summary judgment to prevent the case from going to trial in September as planned.
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland he said at the time The lawsuit was first announced that Google “used anti-competitive, exclusionary and illegal conduct to eliminate or substantially reduce any threat to its dominance of digital advertising technologies.” The lawsuit alleges that Google controls its digital advertising tools so much that it “pockets, on average, more than 30 percent of the advertising dollars that flow through its digital ad technology products,” according to the agency’s press release last year.
Google now argues that the DOJ has not shown that the company controls at least 70 percent of the market, which it has used in some previous cases as a threshold for classifying it as a monopoly, and that the agency “has not shown that it created markets specifically for this business. ,” according to Bloomberg, excluding its main competitors such as social media platforms. The company also argues that the DOJ’s case “goes beyond the bounds of antitrust law.” Reuters reports.
