The Justice Department has just announced that it is suing Google, over its online advertising business. And it also wants to force Google to divest parts of its business. This is the first lawsuit filed by the DOJ under the Biden administration, against Google. The previous one was filed under the Trump Admin back in October 2020.
The DOJ isn’t the only one suing Google right now, as it also faces three other antitrust lawsuits. These are from large groups of State Attorney’s General. Which includes one that is focused on its advertising business.
Google’s advertising business has always been under scrutiny
Google is one of the biggest advertising businesses in the world. It serves ads on about 90% of the internet, including some pretty big websites like Google.com and YouTube. So it makes a good chunk of change from that. In fact, more than 90% of Google’s revenue is from search and ads.
So naturally, it has drawn a lot of critics over the years, as it does have an essential monopoly on the industry. Google has argued that it’s not accurate, since they do have Meta’s Facebook becoming a larger and larger advertising company.
Typically, it’s the EU that is suing Google, and forcing them to pay fines. But this time around, the US is finally getting in on the action. So what’s going to happen with this lawsuit? Well, it’s unlikely that we’ll see much happening anytime soon, unfortunately. These lawsuits takes years to actually happen and go to trial. Typically, Google does settle, and they end up paying a fine. Which, in regards to the profit Google brings in, is a fairly small fine.
So will Google be forced to break up its companies? Probably not. Remember, Google’s co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page saw something like this happening years ago, and decided to create Alphabet, which was the umbrella for all of Google’s products and businesses. But over the years, they’ve kinda merged back into being just Google. So who knows.