Google must face £13bn advertising lawsuit

[Pelican Press 0]

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must face £13bn advertising lawsuit

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must face a £13.6bn lawsuit alleging it has too much power over the online advertising market, a court has ruled.

The case, brought by a group called Ad Tech Collective Action LLP, alleges the search giant behaved in an anti-competitive way which caused online publishers in the *** to lose money.

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parent company Alphabet called the case “incoherent” in its attempts to get the legal action dropped.

But the Competition Appeal Tribunal, in London, has ruled the case can now go to trial.

“This is a decision of major importance to the victims of

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’s anti-competitive conduct in adtech,” said former Ofcom director Claudio Pollack, now a partner in Ad Tech Collective Action.

“

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will now have to answer for its practices in a full trial.”

However,

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’s legal director, Oliver Bethell, described the lawsuit as “speculative and opportunistic.”

“We’ll oppose it vigorously and on the facts,” he added in a statement.

The cases concerns advertising technology, usually shortened to adtech, which decides which online adverts people see, as well as how much they cost to publishers.

Hosting such adverts is a huge source of revenue for many websites – Ad Tech Collective Action says digital advertising spend reached $490 billion in 2021.

It is also an extremely valuable industry for

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, because it dominates web search so heavily.

At the core of the claim is the allegation that

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is abusing that dominance, reducing the income websites get.

Ad Tech Collective Action says

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has engaged in what is known as “self-preferencing” – in other words promoting its own products and services more prominently than that of its rivals.

It says that means publishers end up getting less money for the ads they host as well as having to pay “very high” fees to

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.

“I look forward to working with our legal and economic advisers to deliver compensation for years during which the relevant markets did not provide a competitive outcome for the *** publishing market,” Mr Pollack said.

But it will be a long time before any of this is resolved – it has already taken eighteen months to get to this point, and no court date has been set.

The case is what is known as opt-out, meaning all relevant *** publishers are included unless they indicate otherwise.

It is being funded by an unknown third-party, and says *** publishers who form part of the claim will not pay costs to participate.

It comes as

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faces probes by regulators in the ***, Europe and US into its adtech business, while the firm has already faced fines valued at billions of pounds from the ********* Commission over what it labelled anticompetitive behaviour.

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#

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#face #13bn #advertising #lawsuit

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