10 US states accuse Google of monopoly

December 17, 2020 2 min read

• According to the complaint, the search engine “has carried out false and deceptive acts when selling, buying and auctioning online display ads.”

According to information compiled by the New York Times , ten state prosecutors accused the company of illegally abusing its monopoly on technology in its ad offering.

According to a statement from the Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton, who leads the group, affirms that the technology company entered into an illegal agreement with Facebook to avoid competition, maintaining “anti-competitive behavior, exclusionary practices and deceptive misrepresentations in relation to its role in the online display advertising industry.”

“Google is a trillion-dollar monopoly that blatantly abuses its monopoly power, even going so far as to induce top Facebook executives to accept a contractual scheme that undermines the heart of the competitive process,” Paxton said in the statement.

Also, according to the complaint, the search engine “has carried out false and deceptive acts when selling, buying and auctioning ads for online views,” reducing content monetization for publishers and increasing the cost of advertising.

The Texas attorney general compared the tech company’s actions to baseball, “If the free market was a game, Google positioned itself as the pitcher, batter and umpire,” he said in a Twitter video.

^{Image: @TXAG via Twitter}

Along with the prosecutor, the complaint is signed by the attorneys of Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, North and South Dakota and Utah.

On the other hand, Google considers the accusations of the prosecutors to be “unfounded”, just as surely as “the prices of digital ads have fallen during the last decade.”

According to eMarketer, Google and Facebook currently control half of the global online advertising market.