Khushi Maheshwari, Pune
In the previous week, Google has been involved in a legal battle to fight accusations that stated that it has a cartel over the advertising softwares that are responsible for stationing ads on web pages. For this, the tech giant has had to call to its defence countless witnesses to help win the case. The claims were given by the Justice Department and a group of state attorney generals as part of one of the major antitrust federal trials against google.
The ruling is expected to be delivered by the end of this year, as soon as both parties finish summarising the arguments and make their closing arguments. Google delivered its last argument, on Friday and is now awaiting a rebuttal from the government. Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is presiding over the non jury trial and therefore will be delivering the ruling.
Last week the government got done with its core arguments. The case U.S. et al. v. Google was filed last year and alleges the company of monopolising over the technology responsible for ad placement on various websites on the internet.
Additionally, Google has been accused of abusing antitrust law and misusing the authority it has over ad placement technology, partly due to having acquired DoubleClick, an advertising software agency in the year 2008.
In its defence, Google’s lawyer stated that the arena of advertising tech was quite competitive and further alleged that the Justice Department overlooked other competitors such as facebook, amazon, and microsoft.
The bone of contention between in this particular case is the tech giant’s plethora of ad suites which conducts auctions at the speed of light every time a netizen loads a page, and places an ad on it.
Google’s advocates had experts on board to make its case. Nobel Laureate Paul Milgrom testified in favour of Google that it had not committed any fouls to be ahead in the competition between 2013-2019. Judith Chevalier, another advocate for Google also endorsed the claims of the pricing being justified, since the internet giant charges 20% as the transaction fee in the advertisement market, which is only a fraction more than the usual 16% that other companies take. To retaliate, the government emphasised that Google, nonetheless, has overcharged its buyers.