If timing is everything, it’s sweet for one of the country’s top silks, John Sheahan KC, who Mi3 understands has been appointed to Maurice Blackburn’s publisher class action against Google in Australia. 

Maurice Blackburn declined to comment on Sheahan’s appointment but competition regulators and lawyers are firing up around the world on Google’s control of the global digital advertising system – Maurice Blackburn’s case is strikingly similar to an initial $8bn class action brought against Google in Canada by a tiny, feisty community news publisher, Lisa Sygutek, who owns the Crowsnest Herald in Alberta, and law firm, Sotos Class Actions. Canada is rapidly giving Australia a nudge for its front-running reputation on regulatory restraint for Google and the handful of booming tech-commerce-media platforms which, according to a report from Mediabrands’ Magna investment unit this week, said Google, Meta and Amazon controlled upwards of 60 per cent of the world’s advertising supply outside of China.

But how Google got to its untouchable position controlling the pipes, plumbing and pricing of a global online ad market, and the “Jedi mind tricks” it played on publishers here and around the world to crush their viability is now emerging in dozens of court cases across North America, the UK, Europe and Australia.

The pincer-like movement on Google from class actions and regulators is bringing searing evidence to light from inside Google on its alleged misleading and publisher-destroying practices.

Last week, Canada’s competition regulator ordered a break-up of Google’s DFP publisher ad platform and advertising trading exchange, AdX, along with compensation for the “200 billion times a month” Google required them to use their ad tech system to trade. 

“Google’s conduct locks market participants into using its ad tech tools, prevents rivals being able to compete, and distorts the competitive process,” Canada’s competition bureau said on its ruling. It found Google unlawfully tied ad tech tools together to maintain its dominance and leveraged its position to distort online ad auctions by:

• Giving its own tools preferential access to ad inventory.
• Taking negative margins in certain circumstances to disadvantage rivals, and
• Dictating terms which publishers could transact with rival ad tech tools.

“By implementing this anticompetitive conduct, Google has been able to inhibit innovation, inflate advertising costs, and reduce publishers’ revenues,” said the bureau. 

Maurice Blackburn declined to comment on the state of the Australia class action or the appointment of John Sheahan to the case but in an Mi3 podcast and feature last month, the firm’s lead lawyer on the Google class action, Miranda Nagy, said the US and Canadian lawsuits place in stark relief how even the largest publishers felt “held hostage” to Google, given its “overwhelming presence” in adtech.

“The reality is that if you are a publisher, you are reliant on them and I think that’s the same truth for large publishers as well as small – and that's what we also see in Australia,” she told Mi3. Nagy said the trove of regulator-led lawsuits and internal Google documents they have unearthed have made “very, very clear … that you have a global system, you don't have a system that has any meaningful regional difference at all – you have a company with global market power”, says Nagy. “[You have] in some ways, a company which has more power than many nation states, operating in a way that is essentially uniform globally.”

The firm would not be drawn on what it’s compensation claim would be. The Sotos class action case in Canada for an initial $8bn – currently closer to $4bn due to strike-outs and pending subsequent appeals – suggests on market size relativities that Australian publishers could be chasing between one and two billion dollars from Google here.