• by Ray Schultz , September 9, 2023

Three months after being hit with an anti-trust suit by Gannett, Google has come roaring back, asking the court to dismiss the federal case. 

Specifically, Alphabet and Google ask the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to toss out Gannett’s claims regarding alleged squelching of header bidding by Google. 

The final outcome is far from certain, given the welter of suits involving Google.  

Penned by the same counsel as the case filed by the Daily Mail AC, the Gannett and Daily Mail complaints contain nearly identical allegations, Google asserts.  

For instance, as in the Daily Mail case, “many of Gannett’s claims focus on Google’s alleged campaign to ‘kill’ header bidding,” Google states. 

But the filing adds that “Gannett’s own allegations underscore that header bidding is alive and well—Gannett admits in its Complaint that it has used client-side header bidding since 2016, and continues to use it to this day.” 

Moreover, it contends that “Gannett’s main complaint concerning header bidding, like the Daily Mail’s, is that Google introduced a new alternative product, Exchange Bidding. 

But Google continues, “The court has ruled that Google’s introduction of Exchange Bidding did not coerce publishers to abandon header bidding.”

In addition, Gannett has complained about “hashed (i.e., encrypted) user IDs, and asserts that through Accelerated Mobile Pages (“AMP”), Google ‘leveraged’ an alleged monopoly in a general search market to bolster its ad exchange.”

Google counters that the “Court already dismissed comparable claims from the (Texas) States’ case regarding Exchange Bidding, hashed user IDs, and AMP.”

The Google filing says that Gannett uses Google’s DFP as its ad server and claims to use AdX as its “primary exchange.”

The Google response continues, “it is plain from the face of Gannett’s Complaint that the Sherman Act’s four-year statute of limitations bars Gannett’s antitrust claims regarding EDA and line-item capping.”

It adds, “To be within the permissible period to bring suit, Gannett would have had to allege injury from this conduct dating no earlier than June 2019 (i.e., four years before the filing of Gannett’s Complaint). Instead, Gannett pleads injuries dating back to 2014.”

The Google filing does not seek dismissal of the state case. But it asks the federal court to “dismiss in their entirety the portions of the federal antitrust claims related to Exchange Bidding, encrypting user IDs, AMP, MBW, EDA, and line-item capping in full and with prejudice.”