Texas Files 10-State Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google
Texas filed a multistate lawsuit against Google for anti-competitive conduct, exclusionary practices and deceptive representations, state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) announced Wednesday. Also signing the suit were Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota and Utah.
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Google “repeatedly used its monopolistic power to control pricing [and] engage in market collusions to rig [advertising] auctions in a tremendous violation of justice,” Paxton alleged. Google is manipulating the market and harming consumers, he added. Texas also signed onto DOJ’s antitrust lawsuit against the platform (see 2010200058).
The claims are “meritless,” emailed a Google spokesperson: “Digital ad prices have fallen over the last decade. Ad tech fees are falling too. Google’s ad tech fees are lower than the industry average. These are the hallmarks of a highly competitive industry.”
“If the online display advertising industry were an auction, Google would be the buyer, seller, the auctioneer, and the owner of the auction house -- that’s unacceptable,” said Missouri AG Eric Schmitt (R). Google’s monopoly over online display advertising includes “an anticompetitive agreement with Facebook, misrepresenting customers, suppressing competition and harming consumers in violation of antitrust and consumer protection laws.” The complaint alleges Google violated user privacy through an agreement with Facebook: In 2015, Facebook signed “an exclusive agreement with Google, granting Google access to millions of Americans’ end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp messages, photos, videos, and audio files.”
Google engaged in “false, misleading and deceptive acts while selling, buying and auctioning online-display ads,” Paxton’s office said of the complaint. These “anticompetitive and deceptive practices demonstrably diminished publishers’ ability to monetize content, increased advertisers’ costs to advertise and directly harmed consumers.”
“Google should face competition against its ad technology products,” Public Knowledge Competition Policy Director Charlotte Slaiman said. “If it did, advertisers, websites, and people would experience a better World Wide Web.”
The Computer & Communications Industry Association will be “interested to see evidence of consumer harm when ad prices have decreased significantly in the past decade and competition has increased,” President Matt Schruers said.
News Media Alliance CEO David Chavern said that in digital ad markets, Google “dominates the buy-side, sell-side and delivery platforms -- and collects data across all of them. We wouldn’t let a stock market work that way, and we shouldn’t allow the digital ad market to, either.”
The multistate case would harm small businesses and consumers, the Competitive Enterprise Institute said. Digital ad prices have fallen over the past decade with Google’s rise, said CEI Senior Fellow Ryan Young: “Google and Facebook, which hold similar market shares, have made the ad market more competitive.”