Final week, Google despatched a cashier’s examine to the US authorities that it claimed in a court docket submitting covers “each greenback america might conceivably hope to recuperate” in damages in the course of the Google adtech monopoly trial scheduled to begin this September.
Based on Google, sending the examine moots the federal government’s sole declare for damages, which in flip foils the federal government’s plan to hunt a jury trial below its damages declare. Whereas Google disputes legal responsibility for any of the federal government’s claims, the cost serves to “forestall the tail from wagging the canine,” the court docket submitting stated.
It is unclear simply how large the examine was. The court docket submitting redacted key figures to guard Google’s commerce secrets and techniques. However Google claimed that testimony from US consultants “shrank” the damages estimate “significantly” from preliminary estimates between $100 million and $300 million, suggesting that the present damages estimate is “considerably much less” than what the US has paid up to now in professional charges to succeed in these estimates.
Based on Reuters, Google has not disclosed “the dimensions of its cost” however has stated that “after months of discovery, the Justice Division might solely level to estimated damages of lower than $1 million.”
“Reasonably than require the court docket to wade into DOJ’s uncharted and unwarranted demand for a jury trial, and to forestall the waste of sources that may consequence from defending towards a damages declare price far lower than a fraction of the price of litigation, Google has tendered america cost of the total quantity of damages it seeks, trebled, plus prejudgment curiosity,” Google’s court docket submitting stated.
It looks like Google is banking on shopping for its means out of a jury trial, preferring as an alternative for a decide to weigh the trial’s extremely technical and unusually complicated info.
Stanford Regulation College professor Mark Lemley advised Reuters that he felt “skeptical Google’s gambit would prevail.” Lemley advised that Google could also be overlooking that “a jury might in the end resolve increased damages than no matter Google put ahead.”
Google advised the court docket that the DOJ’s plan to commit a good portion of the trial to educating a jury might lengthen the litigation, whereas mooting the damages declare and ordering a bench trial “streamlines the litigation.”
The Division of Justice is unlikely to again down from this struggle after becoming a member of 17 states in submitting the antitrust lawsuit towards Google final yr.
In a latest court docket submitting, the DOJ maintained allegations that Google violated the Sherman Act when it “stymied competitors in open net show advert tech markets for over a decade,” harming rivals in addition to customers.
Moreover, the DOJ “individually” requested a jury trial—which Google flagged as “uncommon” for an antitrust trial—as a result of it had “standing to hunt damages from Google as a direct purchaser of Google’s advert tech providers.”
The federal government initially estimated that federal company advertisers (FAAs) had “spent over $300 million on open net show promoting.” These had been allegedly overpayments stretched over a decade of Google allegedly charging supercompetitive costs whereas “suppressing aggressive bidding from rival advert exchanges.”
Google argued that the US scrambled to throw collectively this damages declare as an “afterthought” on the final minute earlier than submitting its grievance, whereas the FAAs testified that they “discovered a lot of worth” in Google’s promoting providers.
To moot damages, Google cited a 2023 case the place the US authorities was sued by a citizen demanding a tax refund. In that case, the US argued “emphatically” {that a} full cost of the tax refund mooted the plaintiff’s damages declare, whereas insisting that the court docket agree that the case be mooted even when the examine was by no means cashed, as a result of a “plaintiff might not lengthen a case merely by refusing to simply accept a sound tender.”
It will appear hypocritical if the US opposed Google’s movement to moot the damages declare, Google advised, for the reason that US authorities within the tax refund case “assured the court docket that the identical mootness rule would apply if the events’ positions had been reversed.”
The federal government has not but responded to Google’s movement or made any indication that it has accepted Google’s cost, Reuters reported, however a response is predicted throughout the subsequent month.
Nonetheless, the day after Google’s court docket submitting, the DOJ filed a movement opposing Google’s request for abstract judgment. In that submitting, the federal government famous that “whereas direct proof of monopoly energy is ‘not often obtainable,’ that is a type of uncommon circumstances as a result of Google has flexed its energy to ‘management costs’ for over a decade.”
The US has accused Google of making an attempt to get the lawsuit tossed “primarily based on an incorrect recitation of the legislation and a myopic retelling of the info” that can be “opposite” to “financial actuality.”
Google’s market share “is greater than 9 occasions bigger than its subsequent largest rival and twice as giant as the following 9 largest rivals mixed,” the DOJ argued final week.
The DOJ hopes to persuade the court docket that Google needs to be pressured to promote its advert supervisor suite. In any other case, “Google’s unlawful scheme to monopolize sure digital promoting applied sciences” will solely additional entrench Google’s management over the open net show advert tech markets that “fund the information media, content material creation, and free expression of concepts that underpin the open Web as we all know it,” the DOJ alleged.
