The US Department of Justice today filed a lawsuit against Google, accusing it of monopolistic practices in the online advertising market, according to the lawsuit.

The internet search giant is already facing other competition law prosecutions.

Google “used anti-competitive, restrictive, and illegal methods to eliminate or substantially limit any threat to its dominance of technologies used in digital advertising,” the US government said.

The Justice Department and eight states, including California and New York, are asking the courts to find a California company guilty of violating competition law, order it to pay damages, and order it to stop selling online advertising space. As they explain in their lawsuit, Google controls both the technology that “nearly all websites” use to sell banners or pop-ups to advertisers, the tools used to buy those spaces, and the market in which they are hosted, transactions.

“More than 13 billion advertisements are sold in the US every day,” they note. They also allege that Google has abused its dominant position to exclude its competitors, in particular by “systematically controlling the various digital tools used by publishers, advertisers and other market players.”

“The losses are clear: site owners earn less and advertisers spend more,” the lawsuit says.

Google has received orders in the past, mostly from the European Union, to pay fines for violating competition law. In the US, the first lawsuit against him was filed in 2020 by a group of states led by Texas.