Google definitely has an illegal monopoly in web advertising

According to a judgment of a US court, Google has definitely given itself an illegal monopoly in two areas of the market for online advertising and then did everything possible to keep this position. The group and its parent company Alphabet are now threatening to destroy the advertising savings.

Google has monopoly to certain services

Like judge Leonie Brinkema On the US District Court in the state of Virginia with the “willing structure and preservation of a monopoly position” in the market for the servers used by publishers to play advertising and the so-called AD Exchanges, which are between the buyers and sellers of advertising spaces, violate competition law.

The so-called publisher-ad servers are platforms with which website operators manage their available advertising spaces and store the associated data. However, the competition authorities failed to have the court confirmed that Google also holds a monopoly in the area of ​​the so -called advertiser ad networks. These are the networks of servers used by independent websites to deliver advertising.

Bundling of ad-servers and marketing platform

The judge thought it was particularly problematic that Google bundles its ad-exchange, the part of the so-called Google Ad Manager, with those acquired in the course of the purchase of the advertising marketer DoubleClick and thus prevents the use of competitive products. In the next step, it could now be about the fact that Google has to sell certain parts of its advertising services under pressure from the US judiciary in order to eliminate the violations of competition law determined by the court.

Alphabet or Google of course does not want to be satisfied with the monopoly decision that has now been made. The manager Lee-Anne Mulholland responsible for lobbying to regulatory authorities said that one was basically won by half of the procedure and wanted to object to the other half of the allegations.

The providers of advertising places – i.e. the website operators – would have a lot of choice and would choose Google because the company offers simple, affordable and effective technical tools for advertising marketing, says Mulholland. Among other things, Google argued in the process that advertising marketing is now increasingly via large platforms or in apps, while the procedure is still supposed to concentrate on the market situation in the past.