Ad tech firm sues Google, seeks over $1 billion in damages

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (CN) — Ad tech firm PubMatic sued Google Monday, demanding over $1 billion in damages and contending the tech giant’s stranglehold over the ad industry thwarted its success.

PubMatic is among the rivals whose competition Google illegally suppressed, according to the firm’s legal team. In its lawsuit, the firm references a monthlong trial in 2024 focusing on charges that Google violated antitrust regulations in the operation of its ad tech business.

Months after the trial, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, a Bill Clinton appointee, ruled that Google’s grasp of tech tools enabled it to wield monopolistic power in the advertising industry, violating the country’s antitrust laws.

In this new lawsuit, PubMatic’s legal team charges that once, the firm was “at the forefront of the digital advertising revolution, pioneering breakthrough technologies that enabled website publishers to maximize their advertising revenue and deliver engaging content to users. Then, through a series of anticompetitive tactics, Google stifled innovation, shut out its rivals, and tightened its stranglehold on the industry.”

The plaintiff, in its 82-page court filing, recounts charges made during the trial in Brinkema’s courtroom — even using similar visual aids. Unlike Google, PubMatic’s founders contend that the firm’s success was the fruit of its innovation.

“While the digital advertising industry was on a rapid upward trajectory, in part because of PubMatic’s leadership and innovations, Google was conspiring behind the scenes to monopolize the industry,” the firm said in its filing. “In contrast to PubMatic, rather than compete through innovation, Google purchased entities that already existed in each area of the ad tech stack. These entities had already achieved success in the industry, so Google’s purchases solidified Google as a key stakeholder across the board.”

Brinkema concluded Google undertook multiple actions to willfully acquire and maintain monopoly power. These actions favored Google’s ad exchange, AdX, to the detriment of competitive ad exchanges like PubMatic, wrote Chad Kurtz of Cozen O’Connor.

Google’s conduct “significantly diminished PubMatic’s ability to compete in the market for ad exchanges for open-web display advertising,” he concluded. The firm wants remedies for the harm suffered to date, “as well as for all future harm, including, but not limited to, lost profits, decreased market share and lost business opportunities.”

Later this month, Brinkema is scheduled to oversee a separate trial focused on remedies in the ad tech case. Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice want divestiture, which Google attorneys argue is logistically unworkable.

Google was also convicted of antitrust violations in a case involving its search engine. But in that case, a federal judge earlier this month rejected the Justice Department’s request to order the divestment of Google.