US Dept of Justice claims Google 'corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control'

It's a fact of modern Internet life that content providers rely heavily on the use of advertising to fund the creation and hosting of material we all view on a daily basis. The technology behind it all is a multi-billion dollar industry and there's one name that tops the charts: Google. So much so, that the US Department of Justice claims that Google has «used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance.»

As reported by Ars Technica, the antitrust trial has only just got underway but it's already a firecracker, with the DoJ and witnesses brought to the case not holding back with their criticism and accusations of Google's apparent monopolistic behaviour.

In the filed complaint (pdf warning) brought by the DoJ against Google, it's claimed that the digital display advertising business generates more than $20 billion in annual revenue for publishers in the US, thanks to over 13 billion online ads every day. Managing all of this requires some pretty complex technology (informally just labelled as 'ad tech') and it's here where the DoJ points its finger at Google.

"[C]ompetition in the ad tech space is broken, for reasons that were neither accidental nor inevitable," says the DoJ in its complaint. «One industry behemoth, Google, has corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising.

»Having inserted itself into all aspects of the digital advertising marketplace, Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies."

That's a pretty damning accusation, couched in no hedging-one's-bets words, and the specific focus of the DoJ's ire is the Google Ad Manager platform, which came from its acquisition of two ad tech