A new lawsuit takes aim at Google’s ad monopoly just as the AI train is leaving the station

There’s an old saying — no doubt you’ve heard it — that justice delayed is justice denied. And so it is with the news business’ longstanding lament that Google engages in monopolistic practices aimed at driving down the value of digital advertising. Gilad Edelman, writing for The Atlantic, describes it this way:

If the story of journalism’s 21st-century decline were purely a tale of technological disruption — of print dinosaurs failing to adapt to the internet — that would be painful enough for those of us who believe in the importance of a robust free press. The truth hurts even more. Big Tech platforms didn’t just out-compete media organizations for the bulk of the advertising-revenue pie. They also cheated them out of much of what was left over, and got away with it.

The Atlantic is among a number of media organizations that filed suit against Google this month. I’m kind of stunned that they are only suing now, because the issue they’ve identified goes back many years. As Charlotte Tobitt reports for the Press Gazette, the federal lawsuit was brought earlier this month by The Atlantic as well as Penske Media Corp., which owns Rolling Stone and She Media; Condé Nast, whose holdings include Advance Publications; Vox Media, owner of The Verge; and the newspaper chain McClatchy, whose papers include the Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star and The Sacramento Bee.

The problem is that Google controls all three chokeholds in programmatic ad technology: the buyer’s end, the seller’s end and the software in between that makes it all work. By using this monopoly to drive down ad prices for its own benefit, the news business has been starved of potential revenues. Google, of course, denies any wrongdoing, telling the Press Gazette, “These allegations are meritless. Advertisers and publishers have many choices and when they choose Google’s ad tech tools it’s because they are effective, affordable and easy to use.”

Because digital ad revenues are so minuscule, successful for-profit newspapers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe have become overwhelmingly dependent on subscription revenues, while nonprofits rely on grants and donations. Advertising, which used to account for 80% of a typical newspaper’s income, has become increasingly irrelevant, especially in digital. Print advertising has maintained its value to some degree, partly because it is immune to Google’s machinations. Edelman has written the single best explanation I’ve seen of what Google is doing:

I will now attempt to explain the concept of an ad-tech monopoly with as little legal or technical jargon as possible. We’re talking about the ads that load when you open an article page, like the one you’re reading right now. The process of delivering those ads turns out to be extraordinarily complex. In general, whichever ad you see had to win an automated auction to reach your eyeballs. On one side of the transaction are advertisers, who bid to show their ad according to how valuable they think a particular reader is, based on data about them and what they’re looking at. On the other side are publications, such as The Atlantic, that use a publisher-side ad platform to list their ad space and hope to sell it for the highest possible price. The two sides meet in an ad exchange, which runs the auction in a fraction of a second in order to match advertisers with available ad-space inventory.

This is not the only lawsuit against Google brought by news publishers. In 2021, a group of West Virginia newspapers sued Google and threw in Facebook as a defendant, claiming that the Zuckerborg had chosen to collude with Google rather than compete. Eventually some 200 papers signed on. In 2023, Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain, filed a separate lawsuit against Google. (The company has since been renamed USA Today Co.)

What gave all these efforts a boost, though, was a ruling by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in April 2025 in a suit brought by the U.S. Justice department and several states. Brinkema found that Google had violated antitrust law by building a monopoly in the digital advertising space. As part of her ruling, she wrote: “In addition to depriving rivals of the ability to compete, this exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web.”

Brinkema rejected part of the suit, though, finding that Google had built a monopoly over the publisher’s tools and the software but not the advertiser’s tools.

The legal quest plods along even as other efforts to extract money from Google to help pay for some of the news it repurposes have made little progress. Last week, I wrote for Poynter Online about a law in California that was supposed to provide $250 million for local news publishers, with the money split between Google and the state. It’s gone pretty much nowhere thanks to state budget cuts and political machinations. Meanwhile, federal efforts to force payments from Google and Facebook are presumed dead as long as Donald Trump is in the White House. And that’s aside from the reality that forcing Google and Facebook to pay may not be a very good idea, as Canada and other countries have discovered.

Requiring Google to compensate the news business for illegal acts, if they can be proven, strikes me as a better idea. But the legal process has been dragging on for years now, notwithstanding the new suit filed by The Atlantic et al.

And don’t look now — as The Atlantic’s Edelman observes, the plaintiffs may find that they’re fighting the last war. The larger problem today is that Google is privileging AI search results over queries with links to underlying sources, meaning that many users are staying on Google without bothering to click through. As the Pew Research Center reported last July, “Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits).”

Writes Edelman: “The damage caused by Google’s ad-tech abuses has been eclipsed by the growing threat of AI to journalism’s business model. Google’s pivot to showing users AI-generated search results, instead of links, has been a disaster for traffic.”

For news organizations, there is no substitute for building a direct relationship with their audience through newsletters and events. Subscription fees, voluntary contributions and local advertising are a more reliable path to sustainability than depending on whatever crumbs from the table Big Tech decides to let fall to the floor.

Still, programmatic ads are a relatively easy way to pull in a few extra dollars. It would be a real benefit to journalism if Google could be brought to heel and that trickle could grow into a more robust stream.

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