Sundar Pichai of Google testifies before the House Judiciary Committee as seen via YouTube on a laptop in Washington, DC on July 29, 2020.
Carolyn Van Houten | The Washington Post | Getty Images
Google is facing a new antitrust lawsuit from a group of state attorneys general led by Texas, this time targeting its advertising technology services.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a video announcing the lawsuit that Google has used its alleged monopoly power to control pricing and “engage in market collusion to rig auctions.”
“Google effectively eliminated its competition and crowned itself the head of online advertising,” Paxton said in the video, which could be an allusion to Google’s 2007 acquisition of DoubleClick. The full complaint had not yet been publicly released as of Wednesday afternoon.
“If the free market were a baseball game, Google positioned itself as the pitcher, the batter and the umpire,” Paxton said.
Several Republican-led states are also joining Texas in its new complaint.
The lawsuit follows a separate complaint from the Department of Justice claiming Google has illegally maintained a monopoly in online general search services by cutting off competitors from key distribution channels. Texas, which also joined ten other Republican state attorneys general in the DOJ suit, had led a large multi-state probe into Google’s ad tech business beginning last year.
A third antitrust lawsuit is expected to be filed against Google as soon as Thursday from another coalition of bipartisan state AGs, Politico reported on Tuesday. That suit is also expected to target Google’s search services, but focus on how its changing design has disadvantaged competitors, according to Politico.
This story is developing. Check back for updates.
-CNBC’s Ylan Mui contributed to this report.
