In recent years, governments have gotten increasingly worried about Big Tech’s dealings, with tons of anti-trust probes popping up all over the world. An ongoing multistate suit in the US led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has just unveiled some juicy details about dealings between Google and Facebook.
Where the case gets spicy is recently unredacted information, which claims that Meta (Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet (Google) CEO Sundar Pichai were both very well acquainted with what the deal is supposed to achieve. Furthermore, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has been quoted as saying that “This is a big deal strategically” in a string of 2018 emails that have been uncovered during the suit.
Google, being the fan of quirky code names that it is, even had an internal “secret” name for the deal — it was named Jedi Blue, as per the case documents.
Both companies deny that their arrangement was illegal. Google spokesperson Peter Schottenfels calls the whole lawsuit “full of inaccuracies” and lacking legal merit. He further added “We sign hundreds of agreements every year that don’t require CEO approval, and this was no different”, insisting that Sundar Pichai may not have known all the details about the deal.
Meta spokesperson Chris Sgro insisted that Facebook has similar ad bidding agreements with many other bidding platforms and they have helped increase the competition for ad placements, while still compensating publishers fairly and bringing a good amount of value to advertisers.
It’s worth noting, Meta is not a defendant in this lawsuit — it’s strictly against Google
What’s the multistate suit against Google about?
Google absolutely denies to be abusing its power and states that it readily shares the majority of its Ad Tech revenue with 3rd party publishers.
On this one, Google claimed that the accusation is deeply flawed and pointed out that there are plenty of alternatives — people just choose to use Google.
The anti-trust probes just keep piling on and Google isn’t the only one in the scopes — the Justice Dept. and FTC are also actively investigating Apple, Amazon, and Facebook, among other tech companies.
