Google Seeks March 10 Hearing on Motion to Transfer DOJ Case to SDNY

Google asked the U.S. District Court for Eastern Virginia in Alexandria to convene a March 10 hearing at 10 a.m. on its Feb. 17 motion to transfer DOJ’s antitrust complaint to the Southern District of New York, said its notice Wednesday (docket 1:23-cv-00108). DOJ agreed to the hearing date, said the notice. DOJ’s Jan. 24 complaint is just another in a series of “copycat” actions challenging “the size and success” of Google’s advertising technology business under the Sherman Act, said the motion to transfer. DOJ’s case “is the only ad tech challenge pending outside the Southern District of New York, it said. The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation in August 2021 transferred all 19 then-pending state and private ad tech antitrust cases to Manhattan and assigned them to U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel “for coordinated or consolidated pretrial proceedings,” it said: “By filing suit in another district, the DOJ does not merely risk the prospect of inconsistent judgments, it actively courts it.”