We’ve reached the end of the week. And, hopefully, no one’s been sued—except Google. Sorry, Google.

The DOJ sues Google—again—for monopolizing ad tech

Google’s in hot water again this week, just a few days after laying off 12,000 employees in a not-so-respectful manner. The Department of Justice has filed a second antitrust lawsuit against the tech company—the first was for, allegedly, stifling search competition through “exclusionary agreements.” In this second suit, the Justice Department writes that Google is trying to control all sides of the market—buying, selling and an ad exchange—“Google would no longer have to compete on the merits; it could simply set the rules of the game to exclude rivals.”

Advertising constitutes 81% of Google's parent company, Alphabet’s, $256 billion annual revenues. And this suit comes as the ad market at-large is slowing down thanks to the looming threat of recession. Could marketers see a drop in ad prices as more businesses hop in the ring to take on a divested Google?

Search, email, ads….Google dominates in many facets of digital advertising, and if this suit does actually mean Google needs to finally break up its business, the impact it has on marketing could be extreme. Prices could drop, performance could get erratic, more players could enter the market and shake it up. Regardless of the DOJ’s success, the duopoloy’s heightened attention from the government doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.

TikTok’s backend heats up visibility debates, as usual

The game may be stacked against us more than we know. Spokesperson for TikTok Jamie Favazza told Forbes that employees can manually push content to the For You Page with a “Heating” button. Favazza says TikTok uses heating to “promote some videos to help diversify the content experience” or break up trending content. He also assures the number of “heated” videos are low—“.002% of videos in For You feeds."

But Forbes was able to snag an internal document stating “heated” videos made up “around 1-2 percent” of “total daily video views.” What else could TikTok be “cooking the books” about? If the Twitter controversy wasn’t enough for you, “heating” is here to reiterate: in social media, the platform sets the rules and can break them as it sees fit.

This is a reminder that social platforms are never just “pure play” algorithms with no human interaction. It’s why marketers should diversify their social usage and always try to build their own lists. You may prefer a particular platform, but this preference probably isn’t mutual.

Around the Web

• Marketers are thinking of ways to make accessible ads.

• Ticketmaster is taking a cue from Google, a.k.a, being scrutinized by senators.

• Microsoft’s outage reminds us to backup files saved in the Cloud.

• CMOs need science and math backgrounds in addition to “the arts and magic.”

• A&W satirizes the M&M controversy with its own “controversy.”

Just Can't Get Enough

Speaking of lawyers, content creator and “baby lawyer” Amber Les is killing it on TikTok with her “readings of iconic court transcripts.” Her brand has grown to such and extent that:.

• Her reading the transcript of a judge identifying a Biggie Smalls lyric received 758.6K likes and over 5 million views—despite someone else uncovering the transcript.

• And even her non-"readings of iconic court transcripts" videos receive upward of 1.1 million views.

What are your thoughts about the second antitrust suit against Google? Or does your brand have the potential to create something in the vein of “readings of iconic court transcripts”? Reply and let us know!

Thanks for joining us, and we’ll see you Monday!