The Ministry of Justice created the roadmap on Friday to dismantle Google’s advertising empire, which would be the second request to force the sale of its activities within one year.
The government’s comments came during a listening convened by Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the US District Court on the eastern district of Virginia, who ruled last month that Google had a monopoly on some portions of an extensive site. Now she has to decide what measures, known as corrective measures, should take to resolve her concerns.
A lawyer at the Justice Ministry said the government is expected to ask the court to force Google to assign tools used by online publishers to sell advertising space, as well as the technology that connects publishers with advertisers who want to buy space. In the initial action, the government has asked the court to force Google to sell the advertising technology it had acquired over the years.
To give up Google with “90 percent of the publishers they see in them is, sincerely, very dangerous,” said Julia Tarver Wood, the head’s leading lawyer in the case.
Google lawyers said a breakup would not be aligned with the previous legal precedent and risk protecting privacy and security.
The request of the Ministry of Justice is the latest legal blow to Google, which is also in the middle of a second hearing on how to deal with his monopoly in a federal court in Washington. In this case, the government asked a judge to force the company to sell its popular browser, Chrome, along with other measures.
In conjunction, the two government demands – if administered – will probably represent the greatest remodeling of a strong company by the federal government since the 1980s, when AT&T was divided into many companies as part of an antitrust settlement with the Ministry of Justice.
It remains to see if the judges will force a split, which will be examined between the antitrust experts as the most extreme solution.
In the AD Tech case, which was filed in 2023, government lawyers claimed that Google dominated the main invisible technology that provides ads on web sites. This system runs an auction for an open advertising space on a website, such as a news publisher, in real time, as the page loads.
The government claimed that Google had illegally monopolized three parts of this system: tools that the sites used to publish the open advertising space, the tools used by advertisers to buy it and the software connecting the two sides of each transaction.
Judge Brinkema ruled last month that Google had broken the law to protect his monopoly over publisher tools and software that connects buyers with advertising vendors, known as advertising. The government did not prove that Google was a monopoly when it came to the tools used by advertisers, he added.
At the hearing on Friday, Judge Brinkmama said he would convene a hearing to determine the corrective measures in September.
In order to solve his concerns, the Ministry of Justice said, he plans to ask the judge to force Google to sell the exchange of ads, which facilitates transactions between buyers and advertising vendors.
The government will also seek to dismantle Google’s advertising tools, disconnecting some of those who are auctions for advertising space, making underlying coding open to the public. Later, the government wants Google to sell the tools handled by other functions for publishers, such as file keeping.
Google’s chief lawyer Karen Dunn said the plan would not comply with the legal precedent. Even if the court considered the split of Google’s advertising technology seriously, the government’s proposal would be provocative, he added.
Few buyers would exist for technology and those who could afford are “huge technology companies”, Ms Dunn added. In addition, important security and privacy protections provided by Google will disappear.
“It is very likely completely impossible for what they are talking about,” without causing serious problems, he said.
Google has, on the other hand, proposed that the court demands that the company change or abandon some of the practices that the government said it was used to consolidate its power and said it would take steps to open the advertising auction system in ways that would benefit the publishers.
