Alphabet’s Google faces another antitrust trial beginning Monday in Virginia, one that could conceivably force the company to divest from some of its business interests, this time over its advertising technology.
The U.S. Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintains a monopoly over its advertising technology that matches online publishers to advertisers. Dominance over the software on both the buy side and the sell side of the transaction enables Google to keep as much as 36 cents on the dollar when it brokers sales between publishers and advertisers, the government contends in court papers.
If U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema finds that Google broke the law, she would later consider the prosecutors’ request to make Google sell off, at minimum, Google Ad Manager, a platform that includes Google’s publisher ad server and its ad exchange.
According to research by stock analyst Wedbush, Google’s ad …