The Department of Justice of the USA sued Google for maintaining a monopoly on digital advertising technology and taking care to drive potential competitors out of the field. According to the complaint filed by the North American agency, Alphabet “corrupted legitimate competition in the technology industry through a systematic campaign to control the various tools used by people who advertise their products or companies that are in charge of working in this area”.
The complaint asks the US supreme court to force the search engine to sell much of its suite of advertising technology, including software to sell and buy space, a marketplace for completing transactions, and a service for show them all over the internet. Another of the important requests that the government of the USA is that the judges prohibit Google from engaging in anti-competitive practices.
This is not the first time that the California company has gone through a trial of this type, since on five other occasions it had to go through the courts of the USA and many others in Europewho have a very strict legal system against practices that are considered “monopolistic” or the sale of personal data.
Although on several occasions this situation did not escalate, the former head of the Federal Trade Commission of the American country stated that “this adds new complications to Google” and that “they have so many different cases open that someone is going to come out against them.”
Layoffs
Like the entire technology sector, one of the biggest contention points in the North American company is the massive layoffs it carried out, for which at least 12,000 people in its various teams lost their jobs.
“One day I woke up with an email on my phone that said: ‘your role in Google’, which had ‘unfortunately’ as the first word. I didn’t have to read the rest of the email to know that I had lost my job,” one of the engineers who were fired from the company told Insider.echoing a criticism made by several of the former employees about the way the tech giant terminated their contracts.