Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
Technology companies have a new reality: share prices are plummeting, employees are leaving and thousands are being laid off, and now the world’s largest search engine is facing a lawsuit. The US Justice Department and these states: California, New York, New Jersey, Colorado, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Virginia, are suing the technology behemoth over antitrust issues.
In the lawsuit filed at a Virginia federal court in late January, they accuse Google of monopolizing the online ad market and abusing their power to disadvantage web publishers and advertisers. They also claim that Google uses its large footprint over digital advertising technology to direct transactions to its ad tech products. Additionally that the tech giant imposes inflated fees to enrich the company at the expense of the advertisers, users, and publishers it claims to serve. Tennessee also joined the lawsuit, aiming to break up Google’s advertising business and to have the tech company pay for harm directly impacting the federal government.
