Part 38 - Second Claim for Relief: Monopolization of the Ad Exchange Market in Violation of Sherman

VIII. VIOLATIONS ALLEGED

Second Claim for Relief: Monopolization of the Ad Exchange Market in Violation of Sherman Act § 2

317. Plaintiffs incorporate the allegations of paragraphs 1 through 309 above.

318. Ad exchanges for open web display advertising in the United States or, in the alternative, worldwide is a relevant antitrust market, and Google has monopoly power in that market.

319. Google has unlawfully monopolized the ad exchange market through an exclusionary course of conduct and the anticompetitive acts described herein. While each of Google’s actions collectively increased, maintained, or protected its ad exchange monopoly and/or market power in adjacent markets, the following exclusionary conduct—taken together— played a particularly important role in unlawfully establishing or maintaining an ad exchange monopoly:

(1) Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick to obtain not only a dominant publisher ad server, DFP, but also a nascent ad exchange, AdX, in order to pursue its goal of dominance across the entire ad tech stack;

(2) Google’s restriction of Google Ads’ advertiser demand exclusively to AdX;

(3) Google’s restriction of effective real-time access to AdX exclusively to DFP;

(4) Google’s limitation of dynamic allocation bidding techniques exclusively to AdX;

(5) Google’s providing AdX with a “last look” auction advantage over rival exchanges;

(6) Google’s acquisition of AdMeld to stop its yield management technology from promoting multi-homing across ad exchanges;

(7) Google’s use of Project Bell, which lowered, without advertisers’ permission, bids to publishers who dared partner with Google’s competitors;

(8) Google’s deployment of sell-side Dynamic Revenue Share to manipulate auction bids—again, without publishers’ knowledge—to advantage AdX;

(9) Google’s use of Project Poirot to thwart the competitive threat of header bidding by secretly and artificially manipulating DV360’s advertiser bids on rival ad exchanges using header bidding in order to ensure transactions were won by Google’s AdX; and

(10) Google’s veiled introduction of so-called Unified Pricing Rules that took away publishers’ power to transact with rival ad exchanges at certain prices.

320. Although each of these acts is anticompetitive in its own right, these interrelated and interdependent actions have had a cumulative and synergistic effect that has harmed competition and the competitive process.

321. Google’s conduct has drastically altered the supply paths through which available display advertising inventory is sold, reducing payouts to publishers, burdening advertisers and publishers with lower-quality matches of advertisements to inventory, and inhibiting choice and innovation across the ad tech stack.

322. Google’s anticompetitive acts have had harmful effects on competition and consumers.

323. Google’s exclusionary conduct lacks a procompetitive justification that offsets the harm caused by Google’s anticompetitive and unlawful conduct.