Should you be worried about the Department of Justice suing Google?
Stocks

January 25, 2023
Google, did it hurt? When the Department of Justice and eight other states brought down the hammer?
Google: Come at us, judge.
The DOJ is:
- Demanding that Google break up its advertising tech business for illegal monopolization of the digital ads market.
- Accusing them of 15 years of anticompetitive conduct, including making many acquisitions to achieve dominance.
Google controls 29% of the digital ad market (Meta coming in at second place with nearly 20%) — and regulators have been going after them for years with little luck.
There’s no visibility into Google’s ad platform — which runs the tools that sell ads, display ads and connect the buyers/sellers.
- This leaves a lot of room for funny business.
- It would be like Goldman Sachs also operating the stock exchange.
But other tech giants are also doing this — Amazon, Meta and Microsoft.
So, what’s next? In 2001, Microsoft settled a lawsuit with the DOJ — which set restrictions on Microsoft and severely hurt its profitability. This case will take several years to play out, but for now, it’s not worth losing sleep over.