Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said his state and nine others filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, arguing that the search engine “used its power to manipulate the market, destroy competition,” and harm consumers.
“The state of Texas is filing a multistate lawsuit against Google for anti-competitive conduct, exclusionary practices, and deceptive misrepresentations,” Paxton said in a video posted to Twitter. “Google repeatedly used its monopolistic power to control pricing, engage in market collusions to rig auctions, and a tremendous violation of justice.”
#BREAKING: Texas takes the lead once more! Today, we’re filing a lawsuit against #Google for anticompetitive conduct.
This internet Goliath used its power to manipulate the market, destroy competition, and harm YOU, the consumer. Stay tuned… pic.twitter.com/fdEVEWQb0e
— Texas Attorney General (@TXAG) December 16, 2020
Texas was joined in the suit by Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Utah, according to Politico.
Paxton, who is being investigated by the FBI regarding allegations that he improperly used his office to shield a campaign donor from legal scrutiny and then fired three whistleblowers who made the report to law enforcement, argued in the video that Google “effectively eliminated its competition and crowned itself the head of online advertisement.”
Another group of states is expected to file an additional antitrust lawsuit against Google as soon as this week focusing on Google’s search engine, according to the Wall Street Journal.
A Google spokesperson told the Washington Examiner that the lawsuit’s allegations are “meritless” and that the company was prepared to defend its behavior.
“Attorney General Paxton’s ad tech claims are meritless, yet he’s gone ahead in spite of all the facts,” the spokesperson said. “We’ve invested in state-of-the-art ad tech services that help businesses and benefit consumers. 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. We will strongly defend ourselves from his baseless claims in court.”
Google and other Big Tech companies such as Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Twitter have faced heightened scrutiny regarding antitrust investigations, privacy concerns, and online censorship.
Last week, France announced that it fined Google more than $120 million for violating privacy regulations regarding cookies that were used for advertisements. The fines were the largest penalty issued by the French regulator to date.
In July, Google CEO Sundar Pichai appeared alongside CEOs of Amazon, Apple, and Facebook to testify during a congressional hearing about potential antitrust violations. During that hearing, Google maintained that the digital advertising market is still competitive, citing challenges the company faces from Adobe, Amazon, Facebook, and telecommunication companies such as AT&T and Comcast, according to Politico.
In October, the Department of Justice filed a long-anticipated antitrust lawsuit against Google regarding how the company uses search engine dominance to control the online advertising market. The lawsuit contends that since it acquired DoubleClick in 2008, Google has consistently bought out the competition and built a hefty digital advertising portfolio in addition to operating an automated advertisement-purchasing mechanism based on algorithms.
“Two decades ago, Google became the darling of Silicon Valley as a scrappy startup with an innovative way to search the emerging internet. That Google is long gone,” the federal lawsuit contends. “The Google of today is a monopoly gatekeeper for the internet, and one of the wealthiest companies on the planet, with a market value of $1 trillion and annual revenue exceeding $160 billion.”
For the first time, more than half of all advertising dollars spent in the United States went to digital advertisements in 2020, for a total of $110 billion. Just three companies, Google, Facebook, and Amazon, account for nearly two-thirds of all digital advertisement spending.
