Google has offered a “cashier’s check, payable to the United States” as it tries to kill off a Department of Justice bid for a jury trial – over a case that alleges Google “corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry.”
The offer was revealed in a motion by Google filed on May 16 to a district court in Virginia, in the case of “United States, et al, versus Google LLC.”
This aims to persuade a district court to dismiss claims for damages and stymie the DoJ’s demand for a jury trial – ahead of a landmark case brought by Justice over advertising technology, which is months from trial.
Federal prosecutors blisteringly alleged in January 2023 that Google “unlawfully monopolized the publisher ad server market through a course of exclusionary conduct” – and want courts to break up the company.
The Department of Justice claimed that “Google’s conduct has drastically altered the supply paths through which available display advertising inventory is sold, reducing payouts to publishers, burdening advertisers and publishers with lower-quality matches of advertisements to inventory, and inhibiting choice and innovation across the ad tech stack.”
It wants to break up Google’s adtech business – or “order the divestiture of, at minimum, the Google Ad Manager suite, including both Google’s publisher ad server, DFP, and Google’s ad exchange, AdX, along with any additional structural relief as needed to cure any anticompetitive harm.”
Google, needless to say, disputes the allegations.
This week Google said it had “tendered a cashier’s check, payable to the United States, for [REDACTED] which is the maximum amount of damages the United States claims in this case, trebled, plus prejudgment interest accrued based on a ‘hypothetical judgement date’ of June 30, 2024.
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Google said that civil antitrust cases have historically been tried before a bench, not a Jury. It further claimed that Justice’s attempts to claim damages saw “DOJ attorneys scrambled around looking for agencies on whose behalf they could seek damages” – and that “while its Complaint initially referenced agency [ad] purchases of $100 million… DOJ has only been able to muster a damages estimate of between [REDACTED] substantially less than Plaintiffs have spent on expert fees alone.”
Google suggested this week in its motion to the district court that “a sovereign such as the United States has no right to a jury trial under the Seventh Amendment, even for its damages claim; and second, although Google continues to vigorously contest liability, its tender of full monetary relief moots the damages claim and streamlines the litigation…
“To prevent the tail from wagging the dog, Google has tendered the United States a cashier’s check for the full monetary damages it seeks. This actual payment has mooted any claim for damages based on the Supreme Court’s decision in Campbell-Ewald Co. v. Gomez” Google said.
The case, as they say, continues.
