Google faces another antitrust complaint

A group of US states led by Texas has filed a revised complaint against Alphabet’s Google, accusing the tech giant of using coercive tactics and breaking antitrust laws in efforts to promote its already dominant advertising business. has been accused of. The updated allegations are the latest in an onslaught of regulatory scrutiny over Google’s own practices. The tech company faces several lawsuits, including one by the Justice Department for monopolistic practices.

Earlier this week, Google lost an appeal against a $2.8 billion EU antitrust decision. The amended US lawsuit filed late Friday in a federal court in New York accuses Google of using monopolistic and coercive tactics with advertisers in its efforts to dominate and out-compete competition in online advertising.

The lawsuit also highlights Google’s use of a secret program called “Project Bernanke” in 2013 that uses bidding data to benefit its own ad-buying. For example, in the 2015 iteration of the program, Google reportedly dropped the second-highest bids from publishers’ auctions, pooled money in a pool, and then spent that money only to increase bids from advertisers who did not. Used the company’s Google Ads. The states alleged that otherwise they would have lost the auctions.