The US Department of Justice (DOJ) is in essence, suing Alphabet, Google’s holding company, for being a monopoly. This is the third major case against the Social media giant after having been found guilty recently of playing a monopolistic role in the digital search engine market. This case is about the dominance in advertising revenue and suppressing other platforms by its business practices.
Google currently earns around $2,7 million a day in advertising revenue and the prosecution believes it has a case to show that Google has been manipulating markets for decades in its favour.
The DOJ evidence promises to show how Google enacted a systematic shakedown that syphoned off publisher’s advertising revenue by buying, building, and manipulating the advertising industry to comply with its purposes.
They, according to the prosecution, have utilised technology, and advertising tools, and marketing strategies, that deceived publishing houses into providing their content for distribution on google at no cost for 20 years.
The argument is that Google is not simply a search engine platform, but has rather become a publisher of content and an advertising behemoth as a result. The issue around this is that they do not pay for any of the content but use the content others provide in order to serve digital advertising to those searching on the platform.
This content however is not created by nor paid for by Google but rather has been unwittingly supplied by publishers around the globe who employ vast networks of writers and content creators to produce it. The revenue gained by Google is therefore, in their eyes, a type of fraudulent use and that is what the anti-trust case is founded on.
Many Publishers have seen this as a business threatening situation as on the one side they believe they need the exposure of their website on search engines and on the other, the way that Google is using their content often prevents those searching from even going onto the website while still having access to the publisher’s content. Google also has strict policy rules and if publishers don’t comply they are dropped down the search hierarchy and loose potential audiences.
Because of Google having now reached the size of usage globally, it forces marketers and publishers to have to use their platform and keep Google as a pure advertising monopoly that almost no-one currently has any hope of competing with.
Whether the primary cause that created this situation was due to publisher’s slow reaction to the growing global giant and its money making agenda, or if Google has acted unethically will remain a heated debate, but that it is currently a monopoly is hardly at question. What the court case is due to settle however is how they use the content publishers provide and if they are due compensation for doing so.
