The owners of a company that publishes newspapers in Georgia are suing Google and Facebook on the grounds that the two tech giants violated federal antitrust and monopoly laws.
The Times-Journal Inc. announced the lawsuit in their newspapers, including The Northwest Georgia News, this week. Company officials said in their lawsuit that Google and Facebook agreed to monopolize the market and subsequently damaged the newspaper industry.
“Google monopolizes the market to such extent that it threatens the extinction of local newspapers across the country,” the complaint filed in U.S. District Court reportedly stated.
“There is no longer a competitive market in which newspapers can fairly compete for online advertising revenue. Google has vertically integrated itself, through hundreds of mergers and acquisitions, to enable dominion over all sellers, buyers, and middlemen in the marketplace.”
Times-Journal Inc., The Northwest Georgia News reported, also publishes The Marietta Daily Journal, The Rome News-Tribune, and The Calhoun Times.
The lawsuit, according to The Chattanooga Times Free Press, said Google and Facebook have harmed local newspapers through a 2018 agreement called Jedi Blue. Through this agreement “Facebook agreed not to challenge Google’s advertising business in return for special treatment in Google’s ad auctions.”
“The quid pro quo was as follows — Facebook would largely forego its foray into header bidding and would instead bid through Google’s ad server. In exchange, Google agreed to give Facebook preferential treatment in its auctions,” according to the lawsuit.
“This agreement closed a growing threat to Google’s primacy and further cemented its stranglehold on the marketplace.”
The Chattanooga Times Free Press, quoting the lawsuit, also said Google and Facebook also damaged the news industry by reducing revenue industrywide.
“Since 2006, newspaper advertising revenue, which is critical for funding high-quality journalism, fell by over 50 percent. Newspaper advertising has declined from $49 billion in 2006 to $16.5 billion in 2017. As a result of these falling revenues, the existence of the newspaper industry is threatened,” according to the lawsuit.
“Nearly 30,000 newspaper jobs disappeared — a 60 percent industrywide decline — from 1990 to 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
The lawsuit also said the revenue reductions have forced newsrooms to lay off reporters or even go out of business, depriving communities of local sources of information.
– – –
Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
