Google advertising antitrust remedies trial set for Sept. 22, judge says

The U.S. authorities’s cures trial within the Google antitrust case relating to its promoting tech is scheduled to start on Sept. 22, in accordance with civil listening to minutes launched Friday.

Final month, U.S. District Decide Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, stated Google was responsible for “willfully buying and sustaining monopoly energy,” ruling that Google held illegal monopolies in online advertising markets due to its position between ad buyers and sellers.

“For over a decade, Google has tied its writer advert server and advert change collectively by contractual insurance policies and technological integration, which enabled the corporate to determine and defend its monopoly energy in these two markets,” Judge Brinkema wrote.

That followed an August ruling that Google has held a monopoly in its core market of internet search, the most-significant antitrust ruling in the tech industry since the case against Microsoft more than 20 years ago. The remedies trial for that case began last month in Washington, D.C.

“After having fastidiously thought of and weighed the witness testimony and proof, the court docket reaches the next conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to keep up its monopoly,” U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta wrote in his ruling about the search case.

Google is in a unique position as it tries to not only defend itself from antitrust allegations in court but also stay ahead of increasing competition in the generative AI market, from startups like Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Amazon-backed Anthropic and Perplexity, which compete directly with its search business.

“In the present day the DOJ conceded Google’s proposed advert tech treatment absolutely addresses the Court docket’s determination on legal responsibility,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, said in a statement. “The DOJ’s further proposals to pressure a divestiture of our advert tech instruments go properly past the Court docket’s findings, haven’t any foundation in regulation, and would hurt publishers and advertisers.”