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Ten U.S. states sued Google on Wednesday, accusing the company of having an illegal monopoly to control advertising and agreeing with Facebook to remove its rivals from the market.
The complaint was filed in the United States District Court in Texas by attorneys general from Texas, Arkansas, Indiana, Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota and Utah, all Republicans. According to the ten states, Facebook would become a powerful new rival to Google in 2017, challenging its dominance of online advertising. Google would have reacted by initiating a series of agreements that would have led Facebook to reduce its competitiveness, in exchange for preferential treatment in the advertising auctions carried out by Google.
The ten-state complaint comes two months after the U.S. Justice Department’s massive antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet, the company that controls Google. In essence, the government accuses Google of exercising a monopoly over other search engines and of maintaining its dominant position thanks to illegitimate agreements with other companies, which prevent real competition in the market.
The case is in charge of the federal court in Washington and according to experts it is the most important judicial decision that the government has taken against a large technology company in recent decades.
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