The popular video-sharing platform Rumble is suing Google for over $1 billion for illegally leveraging its technological dominance against its ability to compete as an ad tech competitor.
The lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of California, alleges that Google has abused its position to deprive Rumble of billions in ad revenue.
The complaint reads:
Google exploits significant conflicts of interest that stem from its multiple roles in this electronically traded marketplace. As a result, it is able to pocket a supra-competitive portion of every advertising dollar that passes through the Ad Tech markets it controls, ad revenue that rightly should have passed through to publishers like Rumble and its content creators.
Google unlawfully forecloses competition in the market for publisher ad servers in the market for ad buying tools for small advertisers, and in the separate markets for ad exchanges and ad networks,” the complaint reads.
Google excludes competition by engaging in conduct unlawful under settled antitrust precedent, including through unlawful tying arrangements, a pattern and practice of exclusionary conduct targeting actual and potential rivals, and even a market allocation and price fixing agreement with Facebook, at one time its largest potential competitive threat in the publisher ad server and ad network markets.
