Magnite (NASDAQ: MGNI) has filed a lawsuit against Google in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, seeking financial damages and other remedies. This action follows a U.S. District Court ruling in April 2025, which found Google had "willfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts to acquire and maintain monopoly power" in the ad exchange and ad server markets.
Google's dominance in open-web display advertising has been cited as stifling growth, innovation, and investment in the industry for over a decade. Magnite's complaint outlines Google's exclusionary scheme to lock publishers into its ad server and to preference its own exchange, ultimately depriving independent players like Magnite the opportunity to compete fairly and grow their businesses, while harming publishers and advertisers.
The lawsuit comes as a response to Google's practices that favored its own business over the health of the open web, causing harm to publishers, advertisers, and partners like Magnite. The CEO of Magnite, Michael Barrett, expressed the hope for a future that promotes healthy competition, ongoing innovation, and value creation for the ecosystem as a whole.
Magnite, the world’s largest independent sell-side advertising company, is represented in this litigation by Kressin Powers LLC. Magnite's technology is used by publishers to monetize their content across all screens and formats including CTV, online video, display, and audio. The company's platform is trusted by the world’s leading agencies and brands to access brand-safe, high-quality ad inventory and execute billions of advertising transactions each month. Magnite has offices across North America, EMEA, LATAM, and APAC. Following these announcements, the company's shares moved -2.72%, and are now trading at a price of $23.085. Check out the company's full 8-K submission here.
