Google loses bid to move lawsuit to N.Y.

A federal judge on Friday said the Justice Department can sue Alphabet’s Google in Virginia, batting down efforts by the tech giant to change the venue of the litigation to New York.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria said there are “just enough” differences between the antitrust case by the government and a similar case in New York to justify keeping the case in Virginia.

“Put your running shoes on,” Brinkema said, noting that she plans to move the case forward quickly.

The decision is an early win for the Justice Department, which sued Google in January over its alleged illegal monopolization of the digital advertising market.

Google’s lawyers argued that the case, which calls for the break up of the search giant’s ad-technology business, would be better suited to New York so lawyers could “coordinate” with a separate consolidated lawsuit there that also focuses on Google’s power over the ad tech ecosystem. Those consolidated cases include dozens of private lawsuits against the tech giant as well as a case led by state attorneys general.

“While we wanted to transfer this case to be efficiently heard alongside other overlapping matters in New York, we’ll continue to set the record straight and show how we compete fairly in a highly dynamic and crowded industry,” Julie Tarallo Mcalister, a Google spokeswoman, said in a statement.

The Justice Department’s lawyers argued that moving the case from the Eastern District of Virginia to the Southern District of New York would delay the litigation for years.