Justice Department launches historic case against Google over digital ad dominance

Justice Department lawyers on Monday took on Google’s alleged monopoly on digital advertising in an antitrust case that poses a serious threat to the Big Tech giant’s business model.

Opening statements in the closely watched trial began in a Virginia courtroom and drew a huge crowd of onlookers.

District Judge Leonie Brinkema will decide the outcome of the non-jury trial, which is expected to last about four weeks.

Google’s opening statement was delivered by attorney Karen Dunn, a top attorney at the prestigious Paul Weiss law firm whose close ties to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris have drawn criticism from antitrust regulators, The Post reported.

The Department of Justice and a coalition of U.S. states are seeking to break up Google’s advertising business, including forcibly divesting the Google Ad Manager product.

Federal authorities say Google harms publishers and businesses by abusing its role as a key middleman in online advertising negotiations.

“It’s worth saying the quiet part out loud,” said Julia Tarver Wood, a Justice Department lawyer, in her opening statement. “One monopoly is bad enough. But here we have a trio of monopolies.”

The trial comes just weeks after the Justice Department won a stunning victory in a separate case over Google’s dominant position in the internet search market.

A federal judge could order the company broken up after finding that Google is a “monopoly” that suppresses competing search engines.

The Justice Department complaint alleges that Google leverages its control over digital ad technology on both the buyer and seller sides of each advertising deal to earn up to 35 cents of “every advertising dollar that flows through Google’s technology tools.”

According to the Justice Department, Google has made a series of acquisitions and used questionable tactics, such as charging exorbitant fees and manipulating the rules of automated ad auctions that match advertisers and publishers in order to become a cash cow.

Dunn argued that the Justice Department’s case relied on outdated knowledge about the Internet and compared it to “a time capsule with a BlackBerry, an iPod and a Blockbuster graphics card.”

She said the case carries a “serious risk of error or unintended consequences” and that any court-ordered crackdown on Google would only benefit its rivals, such as Amazon, Microsoft and TikTok, not the companies themselves.

The Trump campaign criticized Harris’ relationship with Dunn, who served as a campaign adviser and debate preparer, calling it a “conflict of interest.”

“By picking winners and losers in a highly competitive industry, the Justice Department risks making it more expensive for small businesses to grow and making websites and apps more likely to make money,” Google said in a blog post ahead of the hearing.

Executives from several well-known publishing houses, including Gannett and News Corp., are expected to testify at the trial.

The Justice Department’s first witness was Gannett CEO Tim Wolfe, who testified that the USA Today parent company had no choice but to rely on Google’s advertising tools, despite the high fees.

Google suffered a major setback last month during a pre-trial hearing where Brinkema criticized the company for implementing a policy of automatically deleting employee chat logs.

The Justice Department argued in the motion that the judge should draw an “adverse inference” regarding the deleted logs, which would allow the court to assume that Google intentionally acted to destroy evidence related to the case.

Brinkema described the now-discontinued practice — known as “Vegas Mode” on Google — as “a clear abuse of privilege” and “inconsistent with how a responsible corporate entity should operate.”

The judge has not yet issued a formal ruling on the motion, but said she will draw “conclusions” once both sides call witnesses to the stand.

With postal wires