By The Verge | Created at 2024-11-26 03:11:19 | Updated at 2024-11-26 05:27:34
2 hours ago
Google and the Department of Justice are facing off again, this time in a trial about whether Google has a monopoly in advertising technology markets.
The trial started on September 9th in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. The DOJ argues that Google has unfairly locked up the market for ad tech tools that publishers and advertisers rely on to monetize their websites and market their goods. Google retorts that it’s created efficient products that work well for customers and says it faces plenty of competition.
The trial comes on the heels of a historic ruling in favor of the government in a different antitrust trial against Google before a different judge. A DC District Court judge said Google had illegally monopolized the online search market. So, while the ad tech case proceeds, the government is simultaneously requesting ground-shaking remedies to restore competition in search.
Read on below for all of the updates and notes from the case.
Google’s empire is under siege
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Today, Google will have a final chance to prove to a federal judge that its advertising business isn’t a monopoly. The US Department of Justice spent several weeks earlier this year arguing that Google maintains too much control over web advertising and uses that power to lock in customers, leaving little room for competition. The trial wraps up this week. If it loses, Google could have to make sweeping changes to the core of its business.
Even if the tech behemoth emerges from this trial unscathed, a spreading legal fire still jeopardizes everything it has created. For many years, Google’s sprawling empire has faced little legal scrutiny, allowing the company to freely build up its search engine, browser, operating systems, and line of hardware products that all intersect to bolster one another. It’s the overlap of Google’s massive businesses that has attracted attention from government agencies and tech industry rivals, who are set on taking apart Google’s stronghold piece by piece.
Tech critics want a Google exec punished for deleted chats
Three advocacy groups are trying to amp up the pressure on Google for allegedly destroying company records. The American Economic Liberties Project, Check My Ads, and the Tech Oversight Project are urging the State Bar of California to investigate Kent Walker, Google’s President of Global Affairs and a member of the Bar. They claim Walker “coached” the company “to engage in widespread and illegal destruction of records relevant to multiple ongoing federal trials.”
In a letter shared exclusively with The Verge, the groups point to a 2008 memo Walker sent to employees while he served as general counsel. The so-called Walker Memo was highlighted in the Department of Justice’s recent antitrust trial, one of multiple cases where Google has been accused of obscuring potentially incriminating documents. The memo referenced “several significant legal and regulatory matters” Google faced at the time as the rationale for a new policy limiting employee chat message retention. The DOJ claimed it marked a turning point for company secrecy — as Google changed the default setting on chats from “history on” to “history off.”
Google is replacing the exec in charge of Search and ads
Illustration: The Verge
Google is making a big change to company leadership. In a memo to staff posted on Thursday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that Prabhakar Raghavan, the senior vice president in charge of search, ads, and other important segments, will now take on the role of chief technologist.
“Prabhakar has decided it’s time to make a big leap in his own career,” Pichai writes. “After 12 years leading teams across Google, he’ll return to his computer science roots and take on the role of Chief Technologist, Google. In this role, he’ll partner closely with me and Google leads to provide technical direction and leadership and grow our culture of tech excellence.”
How Google tried to unravel the DOJ’s ad tech case
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The Department of Justice just wrapped up three weeks of trial where it argued whether Google has created illegal monopolies in the ad tech market. During much of it, Google kept asking a more fundamental question: what is that market?
The company has a variety of defenses to the DOJ’s accusations, ranging from Supreme Court precedent to security concerns. One of its biggest, however, is that the agency simply doesn’t understand online advertising. Google alleges that it’s slicing up the market in a way that doesn’t make sense and that it downplays or ignores Google’s biggest advertising competition: social media.
Google and the DOJ are out of court until November 25th.
Closing arguments in their ad tech antitrust trial will start at 10AM that day. But for now, it’s a wrap.
The final day saw a couple of depositions from Google — including testimony from Ryan Pauley, chief revenue officer at Verge parent company Vox Media — plus a Daily Mail executive who returned in a short but heated DOJ rebuttal.
Google says a closed ad ecosystem isn’t anticompetitive — it’s just safer
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Google took a page out of a familiar playbook in court this week, defending itself from claims of anticompetitive conduct by raising security concerns. While the government argues it locked up the ad tech market to make more money, Google’s witnesses say that a more closed ecosystem is often safer for users — echoing a defense both it and Apple have made of their mobile app stores.
Google’s attorneys have spent the last few days mounting its defense against the Department of Justice. The company argues that conduct the Department of Justice paints as anticompetitive — like locking customers into its services and exerting control over the rules of the industry through its dominance — actually has justifiable business purposes. The point was emphasized by two Google executive witnesses: Per Bjorke, director of product management for ad traffic quality, and Alejandro Borgia, director of product management for ad safety. Combined, the teams work to ensure Google’s ads are bought and sold by trustworthy parties and that they’re seen by real people, not bots.
How Google made the ad tech industry revolve around itself
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Google’s mission statement seems made to evoke warm and fuzzy feelings about how its products help everyone. “Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Google says on its corporate site. The company used to have an even more saccharine motto: “Don’t be evil.”
But the decisions Google made in growing its massive advertising technology business were cold-blooded and carefully crafted to primarily benefit itself, the Department of Justice argued during the first two weeks of its antitrust trial.
TL;DR on the DOJ’s ad tech antitrust trial against Google.
I’ve been going to this extremely wonky and jargon-y trial almost every day, and I joined Decoder to translate the highlights so far. The trial — which is only accessible in-person from an Alexandria, VA courtroom — is in its second week. Google is expected to start calling witnesses any day now, once the Justice Department wraps its chief case.
Google employees’ attempts to hide messages from investigators might backfire
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Google employees liberally labeled their emails as “privileged and confidential” and spoke “off the record” over chat messages, even after being told to preserve their communications for investigators, lawyers for the Justice Department have told a Virginia court over the past couple of weeks.
That strategy could backfire if the judge in Google’s second antitrust trial believes the company intentionally destroyed evidence that would have looked bad for it. The judge could go as far as giving an adverse inference about Google’s missing documents, which would mean assuming they would have been bad for Google’s case.
In US v. Google, YouTube’s CEO defends the Google way
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge
The word of the day in US v. Google was “parking.” As in: did Google buy some of its most ascendant and dangerous competitors in the online advertising business, all the while planning on parking them off in some far-flung corner of the company so that no one could possibly upset Google’s dominance? That is a central question of the government’s entire case against Google, and it came up over and over on Monday morning.
To kick off the second week of the landmark antitrust trial over Google’s control of online advertising, the Department of Justice called Neal Mohan, the CEO of YouTube and a longtime Google advertising executive. Mohan came to Google in 2008 through Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, which formed the basis of Google’s now-unstoppable advertising engine. Mohan also helped advocate for the acquisition of Admeld, another company at the center of the suit. He argued throughout his testimony that Google was never attempting to buy up and neuter its competitors; it was simply trying to compete.
How Google got away with charging publishers more than anyone else
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For years, Google took the same 20 percent commission for ad transactions that ran through its platform, even though it was higher than what any other industry player charged. Executives privately worried the fee was difficult to defend. Now, the Justice Department argues it’s a key sign of Google’s monopoly over online ads.
Google’s so-called take rate took center stage on the last day of week one in the Justice Department’s second antitrust trial against Google. Citing internal Google documents and the testimony of former Google sell-side ads executive Chris LaSala, the DOJ sought to demonstrate that Google never experienced any real pricing pressure due to its unshakable dominance in the market, despite knowing its fee was higher than competitors’ and being aware of customer complaints about its tools. The trial continues this week, with YouTube CEO and former Google ads executive Neal Mohan testifying on Monday.
How Google altered a deal with publishers who couldn’t say no
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Google changed the rules of its publisher ad product in a way it knew online websites selling ad space would protest in order to gain back more control in the ad tech market, the Department of Justice alleged on the trial’s fourth day in its antitrust case against the company.
Through the testimony of a former Google executive, internal company emails, and a recording of a contentious 2019 meeting with Google’s publisher customers, the DOJ painted a picture of a company that ignored its customers’ preferences to strengthen its own business position, knowing they had few real alternatives. Google’s attorneys countered that executives listened to customer feedback and made some adjustments, even though it kept the core of the change in place.
Google’s ad server is “slow and clunky” — but virtually everybody uses it.
We’re moving through witnesses in the Google ad tech trial, including Stephanie Layser, a former consultant and News Corp advertising VP.
Layser bolstered the DOJ’s claim that Google Ad Manager (formerly Doubleclick For Publishers or DFP) dominates the market thanks to its links to AdX. “DFP is a 25 to 30 year old piece of technology. It’s slow and clunky,” Layser lamented. “It takes a long time to load on the page.”
Day 2 of the Google-DOJ antitrust trial begins.
The Virginia courthouse is a stickler about security, so I’m posting on behalf of Lauren Feiner, who sent the following this morning:
The government didn’t say who would be testifying before court adjourned yesterday, but we left off with several industry players explaining the publisher side of the market. Blissfully, the DOJ said we’re running ahead of schedule already. About to say goodbye to my phone, take my last sip of water (neither allowed in the courtroom!) and head back in.
Google and the DOJ’s ad tech fight is all about control
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images
Google and the US Justice Department each believe the other wants too much of one thing: control.
“Control is the defining characteristic of a monopolist,” DOJ counsel Julia Tarver Wood said during opening statements in the federal government’s second antitrust trial against the search giant, which kicked off on Monday in Alexandria, Virginia. To the government, Google exerts too much control over every step of the way publishers sell advertising space online and how advertisers buy it, resulting in a system that benefits Google at the expense of nearly everyone else.
Google and the Justice Department have made their opening salvos in court.
The government is trying to make this case about Google imposing control over a market, with DOJ counsel Julia Tarver Mason Wood arguing that “Google acquired its way to success.”
Google, meanwhile, says the suit is about the government unlawfully forcing it to deal with rivals. It claims it’s not consolidating three markets, just working in one market with a buy and sell side.
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