LONGBOAT KEY, Fla., May 13, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Rumble (NASDAQ:RUM), the video-sharing platform and cloud services provider, today announced that it has filed a second lawsuit against Google for multiple violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act. This lawsuit is separate and distinct from Rumble’s first lawsuit against Google, which remains in active discovery.
In the new lawsuit, Rumble alleges that the massive technology firm has engaged in a number of anticompetitive and exclusionary practices across its range of digital advertising products known as the “ad tech stack.” Rumble filed the suit late Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, and is seeking injunctive relief and damages in excess of $1 billion.
Rumble’s suit alleges that Google has monopolized the ad tech 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. The arrangement creates flagrant conflicts of interest and is analogous to insider trading in financial markets. Google has access to information that allows it to rig the system in its favor and extract supracompetitive fees from every transaction. By engaging in such anti-competitive practices, Google has effectively taxed Rumble’s success, which would be even greater than it already is were Google not employing such tactics.
Rumble further alleges that Google has maintained its monopoly through additional anticompetitive conduct, including by tying its products to lock in customers on both sides of the ad tech stack and by reaching an agreement with Facebook to prevent Facebook from offering competitive alternatives to Google’s ad tech ecosystem.
Because it operates several businesses in the same arenas as Google, Rumble is in a unique position to bring such a suit against the monopolist tech giant. Unlike other companies, Rumble’s operation includes a video-sharing platform, a cloud storage service, and an advertising exchange, which means that Google’s unfair practices are especially harmful to Rumble.
This is the second lawsuit filed by Rumble against Google, with the first accusing the search engine operator of favoring itself and another of its properties – YouTube – in its search results. That suit also alleges that it is unfair that Google applications, including YouTube, come pre-installed on Android-based devices. That first suit was filed in the same federal court in California in 2021 and is in active discovery, with a trial scheduled for May 2025.
Rumble is represented in this suit by Robert Dickerson of Competition and Technology Law Group, LLP and Mark Meador and Brandon Kressin of Kressin Meador Powers LLC.[***]
