Google is asking the court to throw out the DOJ’s lawsuit that accuses it of monopolizing ad technology

Google filed a complaint Friday in federal court in Virginia asking that the Justice Department’s antitrust case against it be dismissed. In January 2023, accusing the company of monopolizing digital advertising technology through “anti-competitive and exclusionary conduct.” per now Google is seeking summary judgment to avoid the case going to trial in September as planned.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said at the time the lawsuit was first announced that Google “has used anti-competitive, exclusionary and illegal conduct to eliminate or seriously reduce any threat to its dominance of digital advertising technology.” The lawsuit alleges that Google controls digital advertising tools to the point that it “collects, on average, more than 30 percent of the advertising dollars that flow through its digital ad technology products,” according to a news release from the agency last year.

Google now argues that the DOJ failed to show that the company controlled at least 70 percent of the market, which some previous cases have used as a threshold for qualifying as a monopolist, and that the agency “made up markets specifically for this case,” according to Bloomberg, excluding its main competitors such as social media platforms. The company also argued that the DOJ case goes “beyond the bounds of antitrust law,” Reuters reports.