Background
Unlockd Media built a mobile-advertising business whose apps distributed ads through Google’s Play Store and AdMob platforms. After Google removed the apps and ended Unlockd’s AdMob access for alleged policy violations, Unlockd could no longer operate, lost revenue, and entered bankruptcy. Its liquidation trust sued Google and related entities in the Northern District of California, claiming that Google had attempted to monopolize a broadly defined digital-advertising market in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act.
The trust alleged that excluding Unlockd eliminated an alternative source of advertising inventory and reduced choices for advertisers, publishers, and consumers. It also pointed to rising digital-advertising prices and borrowed allegations from the Justice Department’s separate ad-tech case against Google. The district court dismissed the second amended complaint with prejudice, concluding that the trust had not adequately alleged antitrust injury. The Ninth Circuit reviewed that dismissal without deferring to the district court, accepted well-pleaded facts as true, and affirmed.
The Court’s Holding
The Ninth Circuit held that Unlockd pleaded injury to itself, not injury to competition in the market as a whole. Antitrust injury means harm of the kind the antitrust laws are designed to prevent. Losing platform access, revenue, and ultimately the business may be serious commercial injuries, but allegations that a single competitor disappeared do not by themselves show reduced market output, higher prices, diminished quality, or less consumer choice. The complaint’s broader assertions were conclusory because it supplied no facts about Unlockd’s market share, the number and scale of competitors that remained, or any measurable market effect.
The court emphasized that the market alleged by Unlockd was expansive: the sale of digital-advertising inventory across at least the United States and potentially five other countries, with numerous participants and similar products still available after Unlockd’s removal. In that setting, the court found it economically implausible that excluding one startup materially affected market-wide price or output without supporting data. Alleged price increases from 2018 through 2022 did not close the gap because the complaint did not identify the geography or advertising products covered by the data and itself attributed the increases partly to other conduct. A plausible explanation must be supported by facts that distinguish it from ordinary changes such as increased demand.
The trust also could not rely on allegations from the Justice Department’s case. Those allegations concerned publisher ad servers, ad exchanges, and advertiser ad networks, while Unlockd defined a different market for selling digital-advertising inventory. Antitrust injury ordinarily must occur in the market where competition is allegedly restrained. Nor did the “inextricably intertwined” doctrine help: Unlockd did not allege that its exclusion was the mechanism of a broader scheme to suppress competition, and Google’s alleged conduct in the government case was not tied to enforcement of Play Store and AdMob terms against Unlockd. The memorandum is unpublished and generally nonprecedential under Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3, but its analysis illustrates the circuit’s established pleading rules.
Key Takeaways
- A competitor’s lost access, revenue, or business value is not enough; a Sherman Act plaintiff must connect its injury to harm in the competitive process.
- Complaints should plead concrete market facts, including market share, competitor scale, and measurable effects on price, output, quality, or choice.
- The broader the alleged market, the harder it is to infer that removing one small or emerging competitor caused market-wide harm without economic support.
- Price-trend allegations need context about the relevant product, geography, time period, and a plausible causal link to the challenged conduct.
- Allegations from another antitrust case cannot substitute for showing injury in the plaintiff’s own relevant market and from the conduct challenged in its complaint.
Why It Matters
For California technology companies litigating access to dominant platforms, the decision underscores a central divide: unfair treatment of one firm is not necessarily an antitrust violation. A viable complaint needs a theory and supporting facts showing how the platform’s conduct impaired competition beyond the plaintiff’s individual loss. Counsel should develop that market evidence before pleading, not assume that the disappearance of an innovative startup permits a court to infer broader harm.
Platform defendants, meanwhile, can test whether the alleged market, injury, and causal chain actually line up. Even serious allegations involving a major technology company may fail when they concern different products or markets from those in a related government enforcement action. Because this disposition is unpublished, practitioners should cite the published authorities on which it relies, while using its reasoning as a practical checklist for evaluating a complaint.
Read the full opinion (PDF) · Court docket