I also don’t have an issue with paying for default placement. The suit is much broader than that. Google’s anticompetitive conduct has included:
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Acquiring Competitors: Engaging in a pattern of acquisitions to obtain control over key digital advertising tools used by website publishers to sell advertising space;
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Forcing Adoption of Google’s Tools: Locking in website publishers to its newly-acquired tools by restricting its unique, must-have advertiser demand to its ad exchange, and in turn, conditioning effective real-time access to its ad exchange on the use of its publisher ad server;
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Distorting Auction Competition: Limiting real-time bidding on publisher inventory to its ad exchange, and impeding rival ad exchanges’ ability to compete on the same terms as Google’s ad exchange; and
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Auction Manipulation: Manipulating auction mechanics across several of its products to insulate Google from competition, deprive rivals of scale, and halt the rise of rival technologies.
More details: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-google-monopolizing-digital-advertising-technologies
They they settled another suit yesterday: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/06/states-google-settle-app-store-antitrust-case-00114176
Forcing Adoption of Google’s Tools: Locking in website publishers to its newly-acquired tools by restricting its unique, must-have advertiser demand to its ad exchange, and in turn, conditioning effective real-time access to its ad exchange on the use of its publisher ad server;
More on this is how they’ve treated new web technologies like WebHID. TL;DR is that nobody agreed with Google’s implementation of WebHID but (especially considering it was just “oh hey we wrote some code for it, this is how it should work :)”), since they’re the biggest, went with it anyway and told Mozilla and others to go pound sand. Google has immense influence over what the web actually is, but nobody talks about that.