Google’s Antitrust Trial No. 2 Starts

There may never be a company with a bigger demand for antitrust lawyers than Google has right now. A little over a month after a court issued its ruling in one Justice Department lawsuit against Google, the trial of the government’s second antitrust lawsuit against Google opened on Monday. This one centers on how Google dominates the market for buying and selling ads across the internet, with implications for independent publishers and any marketer that buys ads on such websites.

Monitoring this trial isn’t likely to be entertaining. Participants in this part of the digital ad market are board certified in mind-numbing jargon that is as impenetrable as the deepest parts of the Amazon jungle. (A chart aimed at illustrating the key elements of the market, contained within the DOJ’s press release announcing the lawsuit, had a 140-word caption). But you don’t need to go insane trying to understand the terminology to know that the government has a good case, given Google’s strength on both sides of this market, as we noted the day the case was filed.