Teads has filed suit against Google’s ad tech practices, bringing the sum total of such cases to four as the industry awaits the looming remedies ruling from Justice Leonie Brinkema following a related antitrust case.
The developments bring Teads in lockstep with fellow ad tech companies Magnite, OpenX, and PubMatic, and come ahead of its scheduled August 6 earnings disclosure, with the outfit — the result of a $1 billion merger deal with Outbrain — issuing an ominous warning that Google may take “retaliatory actions” for its legal filing.
Below is a quick rundown of the latest legal allegations, which are just the latest in mounting legal woes the online advertising giant now faces from both its peers in the programmatic advertising sector, a growing list of publishers seeking legal restitution over its ad tech suite, not to mention government entities across the globe.
Teads has sued Google’s parent company, Alphabet, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeking damages and “other legal remedies” over alleged anticompetitive conduct in digital advertising technology markets. This is just the latest complaint following a federal court ruling that Google unlawfully monopolized parts of the ad tech market and claims its practices constrained competition and Teads’ growth.
Google’s exclusionary ad tech practices directly restricted fair competition across digital advertising markets, limiting growth and revenue potential for independent platforms, publishers, and advertisers, claimed Teads’ CEO David Kostman in a statement. “For years, Google used its dominance to suppress fair competition and distort the digital ad tech ecosystem to its own advantage,” he added.
Teads’ arguments draw heavily on the charges made in the ad tech antitrust case, which was heard in late 2024 and ruled that Google’s actions were anticompetitive — the online ad giant has said it intends to challenge the ruling.
The allegations center around claims that Google’s vertically integrated ad tech stack, including AdX, DoubleClick for Publishers, and DV360, has maintained a dominant position for over a decade, breaching antitrust laws through systematic self-preferencing and structural conflicts of interest.
According to reports, the plaintiff alleges that the actions of aspects of Google’s ad tech suite, such as its ad server, which were deemed anticompetitive by Justice Leonie Brinkema in a courtroom in the Eastern District of Virginia last year, cost Teads roughly 6.88 trillion ad impressions.
Furthermore, Teads’ filing alleges that Google’s policies across certain elements of its ad stack, such as its ad server, exchange, and demand-side platforms, precluded publishers from working with rival outfits — several of whom have filed similar legal complaints against the biggest online advertising company.
The latest filings come within the same 12-month window as supply-side platforms Magnite, OpenX, and PubMatic separately filed similar cases seeking damages in relation to the guilty verdict in Google’s antitrust case in a Virginia courtroom.
However, U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel ordered that the separate lawsuits brought by OpenX, PubMatic, Magnite, and Equativ be coordinated and combined into streamlined proceedings in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to avoid duplicative paperwork.
Google subsequently filed motions to dismiss the suits filed by the SSPs, arguing that the companies were well aware of Google’s business practices long before filing and that the statute of limitations expired because the core conduct occurred prior to January 2019.
Further afield, the European Commission provisionally ruled that Google’s vertically integrated ad tech stack, including AdX, DoubleClick for Publishers, and DV360, maintained a dominant position for over a decade, breaching EU antitrust laws, earlier this year, with a potential €2.95 billion in the offing.
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