Google returns to court to face online advertising monopoly claims

Google is back in court to face antitrust claims.

On the heels of a judge’s ruling last month that its search engine amounts to an illegal monopoly, a new lawsuit opening Monday in Virginia alleges that the tech behemoth’s dominance of online advertising goes too far.

Filed by the U.S. Department of Justice and a group of states, the lawsuit accuses the Mountain View, Calif.-based company of keeping a tight hold on technology that gives it an illegal level of control over both the selling and buying of online advertisements.

Dominance over the software that runs both sides of the transactions enables Google to keep as much as 36 cents on the dollar when it brokers sales between publishers and advertisers, the government contends in court papers.

Google has denied the claims, saying the case is built on an outdated understanding of how internet advertising works as advertisers have shifted their focus to social media and streaming companies in the effort to reach audiences.

The trial, which will be decided by a judge instead of a jury, comes on the heels of the case over Google’s search engine. In that one, a judge in the District of Columbia found the company had cornered internet searches in part by making tens of billions of dollars in payments each year to companies like Apple to lock in Google as the default search engine on iPhones and other devices.

This is a developing story.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.