By Jody Godoy
(Reuters) -Alphabet’s Google on Friday will urge a judge to avoid breaking up its advertising technology business as part of an effort to end its control of tools vital to selling ads on the internet.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, is holding the hearing to get a broad sense of potential remedies to restore competition in markets for technology that helps website publishers sell ads. The judge will then schedule further proceedings to decide specific measures.
Google is hoping to head off a scenario like the one currently playing out in a separate case in Washington, where a judge is considering the Department of Justice’s bid to make Google sell its Chrome Web browser to address the company’s online search monopoly.
The company hopes to avoid getting to that point in the ad tech case by convincing Brinkema that a forced selloff is not legally an option.
Google has said it would be inappropriate to make the company sell tools that do more than just sell website ads.
The DOJ has told Brinkema that Google should have to sell off at least its Google Ad Manager, which includes the company’s publisher ad server and ad exchange.
Publisher ad servers are platforms used by websites to store and manage their digital ad inventory. Along with ad exchanges, the technology lets news publishers and other online content providers make money by selling ads.
Brinkema ruled in April that Google unlawfully tied publishers’ use of its ad exchange to use of its ad server, and enacted anticompetitive policies that were “not in its publisher customers’ best interests.” The conduct harmed competition, and hurt publishers and ultimately internet users, she said.
Google has previously explored selling its ad exchange to appease European antitrust regulators, Reuters reported in September.
(Reporting by Jody Godoy in New YorkEditing by Chris Sanders and Matthew Lewis)
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