Rumble sues Google over digital advertising practices

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Video sharing platform Rumble said on Monday it has sued Google, arguing the tech giant has engaged in anticompetitive practices across its digital advertising products and sought damages in excess of $1 billion.

The suit alleges Google has monopolized the ad stack “by buying companies up and down the chain, concurrently representing both ad buyers and sellers, while also running the exchange that connects those parties.”

Rumble has accused Google of maintaining its monopoly by reaching an agreement with Meta’s Facebook to prevent Facebook from offering alternatives to Google’s ad tech ecosystem.

Google denied Rumble’s claims calling them “simply wrong” and said that Rumble utilizes “dozens” of competing ad services in addition to Google’s ad manager.

“We’ll show the court how our advertising products benefit publishers and help them fund their content online,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to Reuters, insisting that publishers keep a vast majority of the revenue when they choose Google tools.

Rumble filed the suit late on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

This is the second time Rumble has filed a lawsuit against Google. The earlier suit filed in 2021 accused the company of favoring itself and its video-sharing platform, YouTube, in its search results.

The U.S. Justice Department also filed an advertising lawsuit against Google last year accusing the company of abusing its dominance of the digital advertising business and argued that it should be forced to sell its ad manager suite.

Google’s advertising business is responsible for about three-quarters of its revenue.

(Reporting by Akanksha Khushi, Costas Pitas, Eric Beech and Shreya Biswas; Additional reporting by Surbhi Misra in Bengaluru; Editing by Stephen Coates)