Not a value ad: Google’s ad services monopoly needs to end

This week began the federal antitrust trial against Google for alleged monopolistic practices when it comes to the online advertising space, with the Justice Department contending that the company has outsize dominion over what is a lifeline for industries including online publishing. Google, of course, doesn’t see it that way.

Google seems keen on deploying the arguments that monopolists always do in these scenarios: that its dominance makes things more seamless, integrated and navigable to publishers and ad sellers. That is not really the point; an illegal monopoly can be rather frictionless, but that doesn’t make it not a monopoly. The problem is that it’s allowed to set prices and features and has no incentive to improve its services or face loss of customers to competitors.

The government’s case will include a number of publishers — yes, including news publishers like ourselves — laying out how they’re all but forced to use Google’s ad services technologies, which dominate every part of the process, from the mechanisms to list ad space for sale to the methods of buying, placing and displaying that ad space. This makes the company indispensable for practically entire industries, which gives it plenty of leeway to squeeze.

That Google is a monopolist had already been legally established last month, when another federal judge ruled against the company in a separate lawsuit contending its eponymous search engine was itself a monopoly. The penalties for that ruling have yet to be determined, but for both these cases the consequence could eventually be a breaking up of the giant. We hope for another victory for the free market here, part of a drumbeat that can finally rectify the very lopsided landscape in the digital services and internet platforms and infrastructure world.

The behemoth, once a search company that has since branched out to touch almost every aspect of online commerce, business infrastructure and services from maps to artificial intelligence, cannot hold itself as unfairly or uniquely targeted. In recent years, Uncle Sam has gone after the range of tech giants, from Apple to Meta to Amazon, often under similar arguments. These companies grew out of an earlier Wild West of internet culture, where they saw themselves as frenzied upstarts trying to make it big in this new landscape.

Those times are long past, but these companies have kept that same attitude of scrappy startup that have to fight their way to the top even as they’ve become some of the world’s most valuable and powerful corporations, and often still frame these regulatory actions as the government overreaching against the innovators.

But monopoly has always been antithetical to innovation, going back to Standard Oil. How many other innovations and advancements could be accomplished if newcomers had any chance of competing with individual parts of Google’s business without being either crushed or absorbed?

These corrective steps are actually the surest way to preserve that culture of improvement and competition that Google and its contemporaries claim to hold dear.

If and when they aren’t able to call the shots on whole sections of contemporary online life and commercial activity, new players will have the opportunity to step in and do things differently in ways that will help customers and consumers.