PubMatic sues Google as CEO Rajeev Goel decries ‘illegal ad monopoly’

New Delhi: The advertising technology company PubMatic Inc. has filed a federal lawsuit against Alphabet Inc.'s Google, accusing the search giant of illegally monopolising key segments of the digital ad market and seeking billions of dollars in damages. 

The complaint, lodged Monday in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, builds on an April 2025 ruling that found Google had willfully maintained monopolies in ad exchanges and publisher ad servers, tools essential for buying and selling online display ads.

PubMatic, a 19-year-old sell-side platform that helps website publishers monetise their ad inventory through real-time bidding, claims Google's anticompetitive tactics, such as exclusionary policies, auction manipulations, and self-preferencing, directly hampered the company's ability to compete and grow. 

PubMatic positioned itself as an innovator in the open-web advertising space, but alleges that Google's dominance created insurmountable barriers, resulting in lost revenue, reduced market share, and missed business opportunities.

"Google’s systematic abuse of its vast resources and immense power has harmed our business and distorted a marketplace that should have rewarded innovation and fueled transparency and competition," said PubMatic co-founder and CEO Rajeev Goel in a statement. 

Goel, who is of Indian origin, said that despite PubMatic's technological advancements, "it felt like for many years, no matter how well we innovate, there was a barrier holding us back. That barrier wasn’t the limit of our technology. It was Google’s illegal monopoly. Every time we adapted or innovated, Google found new ways to stack the deck."

The 85-page complaint details specific practices that PubMatic says gave Google an unfair edge, including:

- First look and last look policies: These allegedly allowed Google's AdX exchange priority access to bid on ad impressions before and after competitors, skewing auctions in its favour.

- Project Poirot: A secret initiative to reduce bids from rival platforms, including PubMatic, through algorithmic manipulations.

- Unlawful tying and revenue sharing: Google purportedly bundled its ad tools to force publishers and advertisers toward its ecosystem, limiting access to valuable data and inventory for independents like PubMatic.

- Strategic acquisitions: Internal documents from a prior antitrust trial reveal Google considered buying PubMatic in 2011 but opted for AdMeld instead, followed by the $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick in 2008, moves seen as efforts to consolidate control rather than compete on merit.

PubMatic argued these actions not only hurt its bottom line but had broader ripple effects: higher costs for advertisers, lower revenues for publishers, reduced content diversity online, and less transparency for consumers. 

The company estimates damages in the billions, covering past and future harms, and is seeking injunctive relief to dismantle these barriers and restore fair competition. Notably, the suit assures no disruption to ongoing operations, with PubMatic's integrations and customer relationships,  including partnerships with sites like Elon Musk's X, remaining intact.

This lawsuit is the second by an ad exchange against Google since US District Judge Leonie Brinkema's April 17, 2025, decision in the Department of Justice's (DOJ) antitrust case. That ruling concluded Google "willfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts to acquire and maintain monopoly power in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets for open-web display advertising," harming rivals and the competitive process. 

The remedies phase of the DOJ trial is set to begin on September 22, 2025, where prosecutors are pushing for divestitures of parts of Google's ad business, such as AdX or DoubleClick, while Google proposes less drastic changes like increased transparency.

Last month, rival ad exchange OpenX Technologies Inc. filed a similar suit in the same Virginia court, alleging comparable harms. Google has sought to transfer that case to New York, where it faces additional lawsuits from publishers, advertisers, and a coalition of states led by Texas. 

Google has previously defended its practices as pro-competitive innovations that benefit the ecosystem. The timing of PubMatic's filing comes amid intensified global scrutiny: Just last week, the European Union fined Google €2.95 billion ($3.5 billion) for favouring its own ad services, marking its fourth antitrust penalty there.