This is not valuable advertising: Google’s monopoly on advertising services must end

This week, a federal antitrust trial began against Google for alleged monopolistic practices in the online advertising space, with the Justice Department arguing that the company has disproportionate power over what is a lifeline for industries including online publishing. Google, of course, doesn’t see it that way.

Google seems eager to use the arguments that monopolists always use in such scenarios: that its dominance makes things more seamless, integrated, and easier for publishers and ad sellers to navigate. That’s not the point; an illegal monopoly may be fairly seamless, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a monopoly. The problem is that it has the right to set prices and features, and has no incentive to improve its services or risk losing customers to competitors.

The government’s case will take on a range of publishers — yes, including news publishers like us — showing how they are virtually forced to use Google’s ad services technology, which dominates every part of the process, from the mechanisms for listing ad space to the methods for buying, placing and displaying that ad space. That makes the company indispensable to virtually entire industries, giving it plenty of leeway to squeeze itself.

Google’s monopoly status was already legally established last month when another federal judge ruled against the company in a separate lawsuit alleging that its eponymous search engine was a monopoly. Penalties for that ruling have not yet been determined, but in both cases, the result could ultimately be the breakup of the giant. The hope is another free-market victory, part of a rhythm that could finally mend the deeply asymmetrical landscape of digital services, online platforms, and infrastructure.

This giant, once a search engine that has since expanded to encompass almost every aspect of online commerce, business infrastructure, and services, from maps to artificial intelligence, can’t be considered unfairly or uniquely focused. In recent years, Uncle Sam has taken on a series of tech giants, from Apple to Meta to Amazon, often with similar arguments. These companies have emerged from the earlier Wild West of internet culture, where they saw themselves as crazy newcomers trying to make it in this new landscape.

Those days are long gone, but these companies have retained the same attitude of the fighting startups that have to fight for a position at the top, even as they have become some of the most valuable and powerful corporations in the world. They often still believe that government regulatory actions are an overreaction to innovators.

But monopoly has always been at odds with innovation, starting with Standard Oil. How many other innovations and advances might have been achieved if newcomers had had a chance to compete with individual parts of Google’s business without being crushed or absorbed?

Such corrective actions are, in fact, the surest way to preserve the culture of improvement and competition that they claim is so dear to Google and its competitors.

If and when they are unable to independently decide all aspects of modern online life and commerce, new players will have the opportunity to step in and do things differently, in ways that benefit customers and consumers.