Should you be worried about the Department of Justice suing Google?
Google, did it hurt? When the Department of Justice and eight other states brought down the hammer?
Google: Come at us, judge.
The DOJ is:
- Demanding that Google break up its advertising tech business for illegal monopolization of the digital ads market.
- Accusing them of 15 years of anticompetitive conduct, including making many acquisitions to achieve dominance.
Google controls 29% of the digital ad market (Meta coming in at second place with nearly 20%) — and regulators have been going after them for years with little luck.
There’s no visibility into Google’s ad platform — which runs the tools that sell ads, display ads and connect the buyers/sellers.
- This leaves a lot of room for funny business.
- It would be like Goldman Sachs also operating the stock exchange.
But other tech giants are also doing this — Amazon, Meta and Microsoft.
So, what’s next? In 2001, Microsoft settled a lawsuit with the DOJ — which set restrictions on Microsoft and severely hurt its profitability. This case will take several years to play out, but for now, it’s not worth losing sleep over.
