This is a dud of an antitrust suit. What is alleged in here is a stretch to violate section 2 of the Sherman Act. They are not talking about anticompetitive behavior; this is fraud. Be mindful of the fact the FTC approved these acquisitions. It is going to be hard to allege that google acquired this for anticompetitive reasons when the FTC said its all good.

They cherry pick the relevant market. This is why so many antitrust suits fail. The relevant market is much larger than the government claims in the suit. I’ve also never heard of building a monopoly by paying your customer more than the other guy. That seems to be out competing the other guy to me.

If advertising costs didnt pencil out, they wouldn’t run the ads. It is difficult to argue that this harms consumers when consumers don’t buy ads. And the technology is still very new, and constantly evolving. Google didnt march in and commandeer this market; they pretty much created it. There was a high barrier to entry in this market before google ever got involved. Not many businesses out there are large enough to afford the costs to get started.

I smell something else afoot here. Look at the states involved that joined the DOJ. “ Today, the Justice Department, along with the Attorneys General of California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Virginia, filed a civil antitrust suit against Google for monopolizing multiple digital advertising technology products in violation of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act.” TN & VA are an odd pair with the rest.

I have believed for a long time that bots manipulate the advertising market with fake clicks. Google may or may not actually own these bots. But they do have fake engagement numbers that artificially drive prices up. This is fraud. Or at least reckless mismanagement. They should know the problems with bots they have; they should take steps to prevent this. they don’t. Facebook and other similar platforms have this same issue.

Is something coming down the pike to expose this? An antitrust suit like this one seem designed to cover this up in lieu of the worse charges of advertising fraud. Google could settle this case with a large cash fine, and some type of agreement altering the current framework to be more “competitive” in the eyes of DOJ. In the process, they potentially avoid fraud issues by some kind of spinoff of this business to someone else. All while making money on the back end.