Attorney General Ken Paxton filed an amended complaint alleging Google’s abuse of its monopoly power in online advertising. Display ads are the currency of the free and open internet. Google’s goal is to control the largest auction in the world and control every segment of the market. It controls publishers on one side, advertisers on the other, and the exchange in the middle. That control allows it to charge monopoly prices—19 to 22 percent on every transaction. That would be similar to the NYSE charging $22,000 on every $100,000 stock trade on its exchange. The result of Google’s abuse of monopoly power is record-breaking revenue of over $65 billion in the most recent quarter, or over $260 billion per year.
The amended complaint includes substantial additional evidence that underscores Google’s monopoly power and its abuse of that power.
“Google’s anticompetitive practices have broken antitrust laws, and I will hold them accountable,” Attorney General Paxton said. “The amended complaint details how Google, which earns revenue of over $700 million a day, engages in unlawful monopoly conduct, secretly manipulating the largest auction market in the world to the detriment of competition, publishers, advertisers, and consumers.”
Attorney General Paxton leads seventeen states in the lawsuit, originally filed in December 2020.
Read the amended complaint here.
