By Santiago Marino, research associate at OBSERVACOM.
A ruling by a federal district judge in Virginia (USA) determined that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, engaged in anticompetitive practices because it holds a monopoly in a specific segment of digital advertising: the intermediation between media and advertisers known as «web display.» This latest judicial setback is another brick in the wall the tech giant is running into, having faced a similar lawsuit in April regarding its search engine.
The first four months of 2025 are proving to be very complex for Google, amid a global economic climate driven by President Donald Trump’s decisions. The series of lawsuits and rulings adverse to the interests of the internet conglomerate is growing, while regulations are consolidated and added to pre-existing antitrust mechanisms.
In the most recent case, a branch of the US judiciary found Google guilty of maintaining an illegal monopoly in a specific sector of the digital advertising market: media intermediation with advertisers, or «web display.»
In the marketing and advertising industry, this refers to a type of advertisement displayed on websites, applications, and social media, generally in the form of banners or images with text. These ads can include text, images, audio, and video, and usually direct the user to a landing page when clicked.
A combination of factors makes this news highly relevant: on the one hand, the regulatory issue, and on the other, the legal proceedings.
Not only is it becoming clear that platforms and players of this size can be regulated, as the European Union has already shown, but they can also be sanctioned in court cases for violating regulations such as those governing competition.
In fact, the ruling establishes in this case that Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act, the US antitrust law, by «willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power in the market» for online advertising. In other words, these types of activities must be subject to specific regulatory frameworks for their development. They are also subject to «the general provisions of the law» like any other economic activity. The Sherman Act, passed by the US Congress in 1890, was the first in the world to prohibit the formation of commercial monopolies, as well as the development of certain practices considered anti-competitive, which affected both competition and consumers. These practices could include price fixing, boycotting competitors, or collusion of interests in general.
Is Google a monopoly?
The ruling specifically focuses on the intermediation window of the digital advertising market, between media outlets that receive those ads and companies that choose to advertise. However, it is not the only link in the digital production chain where Alphabet’s brands operate.
Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Chrome, Google Play Store, Android (operating system), Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Meet, Google Calendar, Google Photos, Google Workspace, Google Cloud, Google Translate, Google News, Gemini, and YouTube make up a long, diverse (though still incomplete) list of tentacles of a very powerful octopus.
The area specifically questioned by the complaint and sanctioned by the ruling points to a key area at the heart of Google’s business. An area in which Alphabet consolidated a monopolistic action based on the transformations that technological convergence has generated in the media market in general, and in digital advertising in particular. It created a new link (the intermediary) in the traditional advertising chain, which previously consisted of two: the media outlet that offered the space and audience, and the advertiser, who bought them. There, Google is the only player and acted monopolistically.
Digital advertising—as Argentine journalist Juan Brodersen explains—has various forms and has evolved from the initial static «posters» with an image and a link to explore (known as «banners») to segmentation and personalization with formats and targeting according to the particular interests of audiences, their searches, and the traces they leave with their data.
In this area, Google has three «windows» to intervene in the advertising market:
1) Through the search engine, where sites pay Google to appear among the first results of a search performed by someone using the search engine (Google Search).
2) On its own platforms, through the inclusion of ads (pre-viewing or interrupting viewing for those who do not pay for the premium service) of videos on YouTube.
3) Through the advertising intermediation service, through which it connects a «sponsor» with a «seller» of those spaces, who in most cases are media outlets.
In the first two cases, Google operates as a seller of advertising space. It is also the one that makes available content produced and/or shared by third parties, managed by users, or even by traditional and emerging media outlets that use its platform.
The lawsuit in which it now suffers this very significant setback falls under the third model, as Google has positioned itself in the middle of the advertiser-media relationship. By leveraging the volume of data and information it has, it can offer advertisers a segmentation of the specific audience they need their ad to reach without the media outlet (which generates the content) being able to find out or do anything with it.
As Brodersen explains, it uses Google Ads for this purpose, which connects the advertiser with a media outlet or website that offers advertising space through Google Ad Manager. “In the middle, there’s an auction that takes place in milliseconds, which decides which ads appear and where: this is AdX (Ad Exchange). Google charges commissions at every step: from advertisers, for its platform; from media outlets, for monetizing with them; and it also keeps part of the difference between what the advertiser pays and what the media outlet charges.”
This is the activity in which the court finds anti-competitive practices because there is no other company that can offer the same. It’s worth remembering that in 2008, Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, thus securing control over the relationship between web publishers and advertising agencies.
The advertising business for Google accounts for 80% of its revenue. And the specific activity for which it received this judicial setback is 12% of the total. The setback of the ruling is very significant given that, if upheld, it will have to divest from the area.
This situation is part of a long-term trajectory that exposes Google to a series of new conflicts and challenges. For several weeks, a lawsuit has been underway against it for a potential monopoly on search engines, and the U.S. Department of Justice wants it to divest itself of Chrome and Android, no less.
The political and economic landscape in this context is very dynamic. Regulatory fronts are becoming complex. The question now is: is a real storm brewing for Google?