The Justice Department filed a new antitrust lawsuit against Google on Tuesday that accused the Big Tech company of unlawfully bullying competitors who challenged its dominance in the ad tech marketplace.
The lawsuit, which has the potential to break up Google’s massive advertising business, was joined by eight states including California, New York, Colorado and Virginia.
“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 lawsuit said. “Having inserted itself into all aspects of the digital advertising marketplace, Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies.”
Google did not immediately comment on the litigation.
This is not the first time the federal government has tackled Google. Under President Trump, the Justice Department took aim at Google and filed an antitrust lawsuit in October 2020 alongside 11 states. The department said then that Google was “unlawfully maintaining monopolies through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices in the search and advertising markets.”
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Other states joining the legal action were Connecticut, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Tennessee.
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