Google has documented a motion to dismiss the antitrust protest recorded last week, which asserts it plotted with Facebook to control automatic advertisement markets.
“State Plaintiffs’ complaint — cheered on by a handful of Google’s rivals who have failed to invest properly, compete successfully, or innovate consistently — might serve the narrow interests of those rivals,” Google argues in the motion, “but it also threatens to stifle the dynamism that drives Google and other firms to deliver the products on which businesses and consumers depend every day.”
Initially documented in November, the antitrust suit has been driven by Texas head legal officer Ken Paxton of Texas and has steadily uncovered more charges through a progression of changed objections. The complaint recorded last week provided exceptionally detailed insights concerning Google’s supposed intrigue with Facebook, including an undertaking nicknamed “Jedi Blue” that the suit says expected to restrict advertisement header offering rehearses.
The new grumbling depends on inward messages that show the Jedi Blue arrangement was surveyed with input from Google CEO Sundar Pichai Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and CFO Sheryl Sandberg. Yet, Google rejected the deal, included any anticompetitive conduct, and said it was endorsed without Pichai’s immediate endorsement.
Adam Cohen, director of economic policy at Google, wrote in a blog post accompanying the new response that the allegations are “more heat than light” and that Google doesn’t think they meet the legal standard to bring the case to trial. “The complaint misrepresents our business, products, and motives, and we are moving to dismiss it based on its failure to offer plausible antitrust claims,” he wrote in the post.
At the core of the claim is that distributers are compelled to utilize Google’s advertisement server to get to its promotion trade. In any case, Google says this guarantee is inaccurate, “and AG Paxton offers no evidence to prove otherwise.” The organization likewise questions claims that it has kept down rivals from utilizing its Open Bidding program and manipulated promotion sales to lean toward Facebook. In addition, Cohen says, the lawsuit is based on outdated information “that bears no correlation to our current products or business.”
The new complaint quoted a 2015 email in which “Google employees expressed fear that Google’s exchange might ‘have to compete with other exchanges at some point in the future.” A newly unredacted section of the complaint also alleges that Google made concessions to Facebook as part of Jedi Blue, which gave Facebook an advantage in auctions.
Google argues that the lawsuit does not illustrate any anticompetitive conduct in its motion to dismiss. “Despite amassing a lengthy collection of grievances, each one comes down to a plea for Google to share its data or to design its products in ways that would help its rivals,” the motion states. “The Sherman Act requires no such thing. None of the conduct alleged in the [complaint] falls into the narrow exception to the general rule that any firm may choose with whom it will deal, and courts are rightly skeptical of challenges to how a company designs its products, especially when innovation creates more choices for consumers.”
Google likewise questions Paxton’s case that the organization subtly connived with the Facebook Audience Network using its Open Bidding understanding, with Cohen taking note of that the arrangement isn’t selective and that it “announced FAN’s support as one of the north of 25 accomplices in our Open Bidding program, every one of whom has consented to their arrangements to take part.”
Cohen added that Facebook participating in the agreement benefits advertisers and publishers. “If FAN weren’t a part of Open Bidding, AG Paxton might have claimed we were preventing a rival from accessing our products and depriving publishers of additional revenue,” he wrote in the post.
