New lawsuit in US against Google's monopolistic practices

Washington: A group of states in the United States filed an updated complaint against Alphabet Inc's Google, accusing it of using coercive tactics and breaking antitrust laws, Reuters reported. The states led by Texas filed the amended complaint stating that Google executed such practices to boost its already-dominant advertising business. The updated complaint is the latest in an onslaught of lawsuits against Google, including one by the US Justice Department for its monopolistic practices.

Earlier this week, the tech company lost an appeal against a 2.8 million dollar European Union antitrust decision. The latest lawsuit filed in a federal court in New York late on Friday accuses Google of using monopolistic and coercive tactics with advertisers to dominate and force competition out in online advertising. It alleges that Google used a secret program dubbed "Project Bernanke" in 2013 that used bidding data to give its own ad-purchase an advantage. In a 2015 iteration of the program, Google allegedly dropped the second-highest-bids from publishers' auctions, gathered money into a pool and then spent that money to inflate only the bids belonging to advertisers who used the company's Ads, Reuters reports. Otherwise, it would have likely lost the auctions, the states alleged in their complaint.

Neither Alphabet nor the Texas Attorney General's office commented on Reuters' request for response.