The news: Sell-side ad company Magnite announced a lawsuit against Google on Tuesday over alleged monopolistic and anticompetitive behavior in ad exchanges that hindered Magnite’s growth, following an April ruling that Google operates an illegal ad tech monopoly.
Magnite’s chief executive Michael Barrett stated that Google “favored its own business over the health of the open web, causing harm to publishers, advertisers, and partners like us.”
String of struggles: April’s ruling—which marked the second time in under a year that a federal court declared Google a monopolist—has caused many competitors to smell blood in the water.
- Ad tech company PubMatic recently filed a lawsuit against the search giant for anticompetitive and monopolistic practices in digital advertising, citing systematic abuse of Google’s ad dominance that harmed publishers and advertisers.
- OpenX filed a lawsuit against the company in August, accusing Google of anticompetitive conduct that “crippled competitors” and “coerced publishers not to work with OpenX through illegal tying arrangements.”
Google is facing a plethora of other legal struggles: Namely, an antitrust lawsuit threatening its ad tech dominance and a ruling from the European Court of Justice requiring Google to pay a €2.4 billion ($2.6 billion) fine for abusing its market dominance. The company is also facing numerous antitrust lawsuits over its data collection practices.