Adtech company OpenX has accused Google of repeatedly kneecapping its growth through anticompetitive tactics in the digital advertising market — and now it wants payback.
OpenX on Monday piggybacked on an antitrust lawsuit previously filed against Google by the US Department of Justice with a lawsuit of its own.
The supply-side platform’s 88-page lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, said that the tech behemoth’s illegal business practices “crippled competitors like OpenX at every turn,” making it impossible for them to compete on a “level playing field.”
Google, the company alleged in its lawsuit, targeted OpenX and used its dominance in the online ad space “to rig the rules by which digital advertising is bought and sold, to the detriment of OpenX and the entire industry.”
OpenX alleged in its complaint that Google’s conduct has “stifled innovation, harmed competition, decreased product quality and caused significant damage to OpenX, as well as to Google’s own publisher and advertiser customers.”
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Business Insider.
OpenX’s lawsuit comes less than four months after a federal judge in the same court ruled that Google holds an illegal monopoly in certain online advertising technology markets.
The April ruling followed a trial that stemmed from a DOJ lawsuit, which argued that Google used acquisitions and anticompetitive ad auction tactics to build an illegal monopoly of the digital ad market.
Judge Leonie Brinkema found Google liable for monopolizing the publisher ad servers and ad exchange markets. OpenX appears to be the first adtech company to bring a related lawsuit against Google since Brinkema’s ruling.
Google owns an ad server that publishers use to manage their inventory, buying tools that advertisers use to purchase ads, and an ad exchange that connects the two. The judge said that the combination of its ad server and ad exchange gave Google significant control over which ads appear on websites.
The court could potentially force a breakup of Google’s adtech business. Google plans to appeal the judge’s ruling. (The remedies portion of the trial is set to begin on September 22.)
“Now that the Court has found Google’s conduct to be illegal and anticompetitive, this lawsuit seeks to recover damages for the harm caused to us and our shareholders — and to help ensure fair competition going forward,” OpenX CEO John Gentry said in a statement.
OpenX’s lawsuit said that the California-based company, founded in 2008, has only a small percentage of the multibillion-dollar ad exchange market and that its publisher ad server “was driven out of the market by Google’s conduct” and shut down in 2019.
“Among other things, Google has coerced publishers not to work with OpenX through illegal tying arrangements, exploited its monopolies to rig digital advertising auctions so that OpenX wins fewer transactions, and steered advertiser dollars that Google controls away from OpenX and towards Google’s own ad exchange, all while concealing much of its conduct from both OpenX and Google’s own advertising customers,” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit seeks a jury trial, an unspecified amount in damages, and an injunction “prohibiting Google’s anticompetitive conduct.”
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