Google has been hit with a new proposed collective claim seeking £3.6 billion ($3.9 billion) in damages for imposing a ‘stranglehold’ on the UK’s digital ad-tech market.
British journalist Charles Arthur has filed the claim with the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal on behalf of 200,000 website and application publishers that believe the tech giant has violated competition laws and caused digital advertising rivals to lose substantial profits since 2014.
Publishers feel that Google’s dominance in the ad tech market has allowed the company to ‘unlawfully’ restrict competition by favouring its own digital services. According to opposers, anti-competitive activity has caused rivals to lose up to 19% of revenue since 2014.
“Google has inserted itself between advertisers and publishers in the online display ad market by riding a wave of technological development that it claims has brought benefits to publishers,” Arthur said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “This is not true: as a result of Google’s conduct publishers have suffered losses running into billions of pounds.”
The class action challenges the legality of Google’s dominance in the ad market which involves publishers selling ad space through third parties.
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Arthur’s representative Hausfeld LLP partner Luke Streatfeild added: “We look forward to working with our client to return compensation to websites and apps who have lost out, and to help to put a stop to Google’s anti-competitive conduct in the future.”
Google’s allegedly anti-competitive activities are also under investigation by regulators in France, the European Union and Australia.
In January, The US justice department and eight states filed a lawsuit against Alphabet-owned tech giant Google, alleging that it abused its dominance of the digital advertising business. The government believed that Google had plans to “neutralise or eliminate” rivals through acquisitions and by forcing advertisers to use its ad products by making it increasingly hard to use competitor’s services.
