Judicial Panel Transfers 30th Google Antitrust Case to SDNY

The July 22 complaint in which Appen Media, owner and operator of several newspapers in Georgia, alleged Google and Meta have “monopolized the digital advertising market thereby strangling a primary source of revenue for newspapers across the country,” was transferred Tuesday to the U.S. District Court for Southern New York, to be consolidated with similar cases. The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, in a conditional transfer order Nov. 2 (docket 3010), said the panel transferred 18 cases to the Southern District of New York in August 2021 for coordinated or consolidated pretrial proceedings, and that 11 more cases had since been transferred there. The Appen Media v. Google action appears to involve “questions of fact that are common to the actions previously transferred” and consolidated under U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel for the Southern District of New York, said the panel.