Rumble Files Lawsuit Against Google, Alleges Billions Of Dollars In Lost Ad Revenue

Video-sharing platform Rumble announced Monday that it has filed a lawsuit against Google, arguing that the tech giant has engaged in anticompetitive practices through its digital advertising products. The company is seeking $1 billion in lost advertising revenue.

The suit alleges that Google has monopolized the ad stack “by buying companies up and down the chain, concurrently representing both ad buyers and sellers, while also running the exchange that connects those parties.”

Rumble has accused Google of securing its advertising monopoly by working with Meta in order to ensure that Facebook cannot provide alternatives to Google’s vast ad tech network. Rumble has been a client of Google’s until it decided to build its own ad tech in 2022.

This is not the first time the up and coming video platform has taken legal action against Google. Rumble first sued Google in 2021 for illegally favoring YouTube videos in the platform’s search results and Android operating systems.

That lawsuit is currently in discovery after a judge ruled against Google’s request to have the case dismissed.

The new lawsuit alleges that Google’s anticompetitive conduct in the ad marketplace cost the company billions of dollars in revenue.

“Google exploits significant conflicts of interest that stem from its multiple roles in this electronically traded marketplace,” the complaint reads. “As a result, it is able to pocket a supra-competitive portion of every advertising dollar that passes through the Ad Tech markets it controls, ad-revenue that rightly should have passed through to publishers like Rumble and its content creators.”

The lawsuit also alleges that Google’s monopoly in ad tech allows it to illegally disadvantage Rumble as a competitor.

While Rumble’s ad tech capabilities are limited, the company sees its cloud and advertising capabilities as a major part of their business going forward.

“Google unlawfully forecloses competition in the market for publisher ad servers in the market for ad buying tools for small advertisers, and in the separate markets for ad exchanges and ad networks,” reads the complaint. “Google excludes competition by engaging in conduct unlawful under settled antitrust precedent, including through unlawful tying arrangements, a pattern and practice of exclusionary conduct targeting actual and potential rivals, and even a market allocation and price fixing agreement with Facebook, at one time its largest potential competitive threat in the publisher ad server and ad network markets.”

Google has denied Rumble’s claims, stating that they are “simply wrong,” arguing that Rumble uses a number of ad services in addition to Google. “We’ll show the court how our advertising products benefit publishers and help them fund their content online,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to Reuters.

Google has faced a number of legal challenges to its ad tech dominance in recent years. In 2021, the Justice Department and a number of U.S. states filed a lawsuit against Google for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act due to its dominance in the sector. The European Union has taken similar action against the tech giant.