Justice Department lawyers on Monday targeted Google's alleged dominance in the digital advertising market in an antitrust lawsuit that poses a major threat to the tech giants' business models.
Opening statements in the closely watched trial began in a Virginia courtroom, drawing a large crowd of spectators.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema will decide the outcome of the non-jury trial, which is expected to last about four weeks.
Google's opening statement was delivered by Karen Dunn, a top litigation lawyer at the top law firm Paul, Weiss, whose close ties to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris have drawn criticism from antitrust watchdogs, as reported by The Washington Post.
The Department of Justice and a coalition of U.S. states are seeking to break up Google's advertising business, including forcing a sale of the company's Ads Manager product.
The federal government alleges that Google is abusing its role as the primary gatekeeper of online advertising transactions to the detriment of both publishers and businesses.
“It's worth saying the quiet part out loud,” Justice Department lawyer Julia Tarver Wood said in her opening statement. “One monopoly is bad enough. But here we have three monopolies.”
The trial began just weeks after the Justice Department won a surprise victory in a separate case targeting Google's dominance in online search.
A federal court could rule that Google is a “monopoly” that has stifled rival search engines and order the company to be broken up.
According to the Justice Department's complaint, Google leverages its dominance of digital advertising technology on both the buy and sell sides of every ad transaction to siphon off up to 35 cents “of every dollar of advertising revenue that flows through Google's ad technology tools.”
According to the Justice Department, Google built its cash cow through a series of acquisitions, charging excessive fees and manipulating the rules of its automated ad auction system that matches advertisers with publishers.
Dunn argued that the Justice Department's case was based on an outdated understanding of the Internet, likening it to “a time capsule containing a Blackberry, an iPod and a Blockbuster video card.”
She argued that the case was fraught with “risk of significant error and unintended consequences” and that any court-ordered crackdown on Google would not benefit the company, but only benefit rivals such as Amazon, Microsoft and TikTok.
The Trump campaign has strongly criticised Harris's partnership with Dunn, who has served as a campaign adviser and debate preparer, as a “conflict of interest”.
“By picking winners and losers in a highly competitive industry, the Department of Justice risks making it more expensive for small businesses to grow and monetize their websites and apps,” Google said in a blog post ahead of the trial.
Executives from several prominent publishing companies, including Gannett and News Corp., are scheduled to testify at the trial.
The Justice Department's first witness was Gannett executive Tim Wolf, who testified that USA Today's parent company had no choice but to rely on Google's advertising tools, despite the high fees.
Google suffered a major blow in a pretrial hearing last month, when Judge Brinkema slammed the company for implementing a policy to automatically delete employee chat logs.
In its motion, the Justice Department argued that the judge should draw “adverse inferences” about the deleted logs, allowing the court to presume Google knowingly destroyed evidence relevant to the case.
Brinkema said the now-defunct practice, known internally at Google as “Vegas mode,” was a “clear abuse of privilege” and “not the way a responsible corporate entity should function.”
The judge has not yet made a formal ruling on the motion but noted that both sides will draw “inferences” as they call witnesses to the stand.
With post wire
