An antitrust lawsuit from a group of state attorneys regarding its advertising technology and practices uncovered a surprising project of the tech giant meant to give it an edge over its competitors.
The Texas-led antitrust lawsuit, which accused Google of monopoly on digitals ads to the detriment of competitors and publishers, was filed in December. However, the lawsuit filed by Google earlier this month – and viewed by The Wall Street Journal – appeared to not have been properly redacted. The documents uploaded to the court’s public docket revealed business elements of the search engine which show that Google has been using a program called “Bernanke” to gain a huge advantage in its ad-buying system by analyzing historical bidding data.
Google gained millions of dollars trough this tactics
A federal judge ultimately allowed Google to refile it under seal, but the fact that remains that, “Project Bernanke” has been in use for several years and has been critical to generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the company for each one of those years while giving the company an unfair and obvious advantage over its rivals.
But while Google acknowledged that the project exists, it said in the filing that ”the details of Project Bernanke’s operations are not disclosed to publishers” and denied that using such data to inform bids cannot be considered inappropriate as the information is “comparable to data maintained by other buying tools.” Furthermore, Google spokesman Peter Schottenfels considered that the complaint “misrepresents many aspects of our ad tech business” and that they are looking “forward to making our case in court.”
Google for using anti-competitive
However, contrary to the statements above, a 2013 internal presentation showed that because of how efficient the program was, “Project Bernanke” was thought to generate an impressive $230 million in revenue for Google. And that only in the year in question.
This is not the first time Google has had to face antitrust lawsuits. The company has previously been on the receiving end of multiple lawsuits from the Department of Justice and almost three dozen states. In a similar fashion, a lawsuit filed in October 2020, blames Google for using anti-competitive tactics in order to maintain a monopoly and remain the default search engine on browsers and smartphones.
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