Google’s digital ad network declared an illegal monopoly, joining its search engine in penalty box

Google has been branded an abusive monopolist by a federal judge for the second time in less than a year.

Google has been branded an abusive monopolist by a federal judge for the second time in less than a year, this time for illegally exploiting some of its online marketing technology to boost the profits fueling an internet empire currently worth $1.8 trillion.

The ruling issued Thursday by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Virginia comes on the heels of a separate decision in August that concluded Google’s namesake search engine has been illegally leveraging its dominance to stifle competition and innovation.

After the U.S. Justice Department targeted Google’s ubiquitous search engine during President Donald Trump’s first term, the same agency went after the company’s lucrative digital advertising network in 2023 during President Joe Biden’s ensuing administration in an attempt to undercut the power that Google has amassed since its inception in a Silicon Valley garage in 1998.

Although antitrust regulators prevailed both times, the battle is likely to continue for several more years as Google tries to overturn the two monopoly decisions in appeals while forging ahead in the new and highly lucrative technological frontier of artificial intelligence.

The next step in the latest case is a penalty phase that will likely begin late this year or early next year. The same so-called remedy hearings in the search monopoly case are scheduled to begin Monday in Washington D.C., where Justice Department lawyers will try to convince U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta to impose a sweeping punishment that includes a proposed requirement for Google to sell its Chrome web browser.

Brinkema’s 115-page decision centers on the marketing machine that Google has spent the past 17 years building around its search engine and other widely used products and services, including its Chrome browser, YouTube video site and digital maps.

The system was largely built around a series of acquisitions that started with Google’s $3.2 billion purchase of online ad specialist DoubleClick in 2008. U.S. regulators approved the deals at the time they were made before realising that they had given the Mountain View, California, company a platform to manipulate the prices in an ecosystem that a wide range of websites depend on for revenue and provides a vital marketing connection to consumers.