The owner of The Charleston Gazette-Mail and other news outlets in West Virginia filed a lawsuit against Google and Facebook in federal court on Friday, accusing the companies of taking advantage of ‘competitive and monopolistic practices’ that damaged the newspaper business. .
The publisher, HD Media, said the lawsuit was the first of its kind filed by a newspaper company. The case focuses on the central interest of Google in the online advertising market, as well as an agreement between Google and Facebook that is at the center of an antitrust lawsuit instituted by ten state attorneys general. It is estimated that the two technology companies together accounted for more than half of all spending on digital advertising in 2019.
“Google and Facebook have monopolized the digital advertising market, thus strangling a primary source of revenue for newspapers across the country,” HD Media said in the case filed with the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of West Virginia.
“There is no longer a competitive market in which newspapers can reasonably compete for online advertising revenue,” the case continued.
The rise of digital media has led to a sharp drop in revenue for many newspaper businesses, which once relied on print ads and print subscriptions to stay in the bag. More than one in four American newspapers closed between 2004 and 2018, and tens of thousands of editorial posts disappeared.
In addition to The Gazette-Mail, which won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 2018, The Herald-Dispatch and The Logan Banner are among the papers.
“We invite every other newspaper in America to join this case,” Doug Reynolds, the managing partner of HD Media, said in a statement on Friday. “We are fighting not only for the future of the press, but also for the preservation of our democracy.”
Technical ventures have been scrutinized over the past few months. In October, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of illegally protecting its Internet search and digital advertising market monopoly. In two lawsuits filed in December, dozens of states accused Google of abusing its dominance over the online advertising business and thwarting competitors.
Last month, lyric-annotation company Genius Media and two left-wing magazines, The Nation and The Progressive, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google – as well as its parent company, Alphabet, and a sibling, YouTube – citing the case. . is called ‘competitive competition’ in the digital advertising market.
Google has made a request for comment referring to a statement issued by the company this month in response to a separate complaint. In the statement, the company said its advertising business “helps websites and apps to make money and finance high quality content.” Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.