Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

On the evening of March 31, Beijing time, it was reported that Google was hit by a new class action lawsuit in the UK today, accusing Google of abusing its dominant position in online advertising business and claiming 3.4 billion pounds (about 4.2 billion US dollars, CTOnews.com Note: currently about 28.934 billion yuan).

The class-action lawsuit, filed by Charles Arthur, a former technology editor at the British newspaper The Guardian, on behalf of publishers, accuses Google of illegally exploiting its dominance of online advertising to reduce the revenue publishers can earn from those ads.

Google said it would vigorously crack down on such "speculative" behavior.

The case is the second such lawsuit Google has faced since November. Claudio Pollack, the former head of Ofcom, filed a similar lawsuit against Google seeking damages of up to £ 13.6 billion ($16.8 billion).

Both cases involve Google's advertising technology, which can determine in less than a second what online ads consumers will see, how much it will cost and how much revenue publishers will receive. This online display advertising is a major source of revenue for many websites.

Google's dominance in advertising technology is currently being investigated by the UK's antitrust regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).

"The CMA is currently investigating Google for anticompetitive practices in advertising technology, but they do not have the authority to demand compensation from Google for those who have suffered significant losses," Arthur said in the lawsuit today. Therefore, we can only correct this mistake through the courts, which is why I brought this lawsuit. "

Google said: "Our advertising tools, and those of many of our ad-tech competitors, are helping millions of websites and apps fund their content and enable businesses of all sizes to effectively reach new customers."

In addition to Britain, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Google in January of participating in a systematic campaign to seize control of a wide range of high-tech tools used by publishers, thereby undermining fair competition in the adtech industry. But yesterday Google asked a court to dismiss the case, saying the US government exaggerated its control of the market.

In addition, as early as 2021, the French antitrust regulator Autorité de la concurrence fined Google 220 million euros (about $230 million, CTOnews.com note: currently about 1.648 billion yuan) for favoring its own services in online advertising.

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