For years, Google has been the subject of endless grumbling about its stranglehold on the online advertising market. Much of the griping revolves around Google Ad Manager, the omnipresent software suite that websites globally rely on to flog ads.

This tech marvel orchestrates split-second auctions to slap ads onto pages as they load. Unsurprisingly, this dominance has dragged Google into federal court.

Judge Leonie Brinkema of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia will oversee the commencement of a trial. This is Google's second antitrust showdown in under a year. In August, a federal judge decreed that Google had unlawfully maintained a monopoly in online search, a significant win for the Justice Department. The upcoming trial is the latest broadside by federal antitrust regulators against Big Tech, pitting century-old competition laws against behemoths that have revolutionised shopping, communication, and information consumption.The regulators have also taken aim at Apple, Amazon, and Meta, accusing them of similar power abuses.

Writing in her company bog, Google's vice president for regulatory affairs, Lee-Anne Mulholland moaned that the Justice Department was "picking winners and losers in a highly competitive industry. With the cost of ads going down and the number of ads sold going up, the market is working," she proclaimed. "The DOJ's case risks inefficiencies and higher prices -- the last thing that America's economy or our small businesses need right now."