Antitrust Soul Search | AdExchanger

U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta is probably sitting in his chambers right now, considering a decision in the Justice Department’s landmark antitrust case against Google over the company’s (alleged) dominance of the search engine market.

His ruling, expected in the fall, is highly anticipated. If Judge Mehta sides with the government, Google will have to make major changes to its search operations. (The exact outcome will be decided at a future hearing.)

“This would be a game-changer and unleash innovation in search like we haven’t seen in 20 years,” Adam Epstein, co-CEO and president of search ad company adMarketplace, said on this episode of AdExchanger Talks.

Speaking of changes, when adMarketplace was founded in 2000, the search world looked very different. Google was only two years old, the search engine space was full of competitors, and Google’s search algorithm was really innovative, Epstein says.

But in 2004, Google went public and gradually but surely started thinking more about the gods of Wall Street and the monetization of search than about the quality of the search results themselves, he says.

“Google is fighting the law of large numbers, and their workforce and management team are largely compensated by the value of the stock price,” Epstein says. “Of course, that’s a hard thing to manage, (and) when you have 90% of the market, there are really few ways to increase the stock price other than extracting value.”

Also in this episode:Is AI-powered search the future, why Google’s Performance Max is driving some advertisers crazy, and how answering a Craigslist ad changed Epstein’s life. Plus: Why testimony and depositions from the Justice Department’s upcoming lawsuit against Google could come back in the government’s ad-tech-focused antitrust lawsuit against Google, which is set to begin Sept. 9.

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