“Google has repeatedly and shamelessly broken antitrust and consumer protection laws. Its modus operandi is to monopolize and twist the facts,” says the Antitrust lawsuit launched Wednesday, “Google is using its position of power on all sides of the online advertising market to unlawfully exclude competitors. It also boldly claims that ‘we will never sell your personal information to anyone’ despite the entire business model of targeted advertising is. ”

With the on Wednesday In a US federal district court, ten US states are suing Google for abuse of its advertising monopoly, including insider trading with advertising space and the formation of a kind of cartel with Facebook. Google denies this, a statement from Facebook is not yet available.

Countless allegations The description begins 2008 shortly after the competition authority FTC gave Google the green light to take over the online advertising service provider DoubleClick. Google is said to have broken promises made to the FTC and the US Parliament soon. Since then, Google has been trading on all sides of the market: with advertisers who have to pay fees, with operators of websites and apps who also have to pay fees, and when processing advertising contracts via an exchange, where even higher fees are incurred.

On such advertising exchanges, advertisers bid in real time for the display of their advertisements in end-user browsers and apps. Initially, Google prohibited website publishers from working with more than one exchange. Because this reduced the income of the websites, they found another way: Header Bidding.

With header bidding, not an advertising server but a JavaScript in the user’s browser opens up the possibility for several advertising exchanges for to offer the advertising space. The website operator’s advertising server (usually the Google Ad Manager) then takes precedence. That was lucrative for the website operator, but Google saw its skins swim away

Since then, Google has been fighting header bidding with great effort and success. At first it allowed the use of several advertising exchanges – but is said to have secretly won his own exchange, even if an external bid was higher.