In Google’s antitrust trial, documents say one thing. Tech giant’s witnesses say another

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia — The judge who will decide whether Google has a monopoly on the technology that matches buyers and sellers of online advertising will have to decide whether to believe what Google executives wrote or what the witnesses said on the stand.

The Justice Department is wrapping up its antitrust case against Google this week in a federal courtroom in Virginia. The federal government and a coalition of states say Google has built and maintained a monopoly on the technology used to buy and sell ads that consumers see as they browse the web.

Google counters that the government is wrongly focusing on a very narrow slice of advertising — essentially the rectangular banner ads that appear at the top and right of a publisher’s website — and that in the broader online advertising market, Google is being attacked from all sides by competitors, including social media companies and TV streaming services.

Many of the key witnesses testifying before the government were Google managers and executives who often tried to deny information they wrote in emails, chat conversations and company presentations.

That was especially evident Thursday during the testimony of Jonathan Bellack, a Google product manager who wrote an email that government lawyers say is particularly damning.

In 2016, Bellack wrote an email in which he wondered, “Is there a deeper problem with us owning a platform, an exchange, and a huge network? The analogy would be if Goldman or Citibank owned NYSE,” the New York Stock Exchange.

For the Justice Department, Bellack’s description is a near-perfect summary of his case. He argues that Google’s technology dominates both the marketplace that online publishers use to sell available ad space on their websites and the technology that massive networks of advertisers use to buy ad space. Google even dominates the “ad exchanges” that serve as middlemen to connect buyers and sellers, the lawsuit claims.

Justice claims that as a result of Google’s dominant position throughout all stages of the transaction, the Mountain View, California-based tech giant excluded competition and was able to charge exorbitant fees, as high as 36 cents on the dollar for each ad impression through its ad technology suite.

But during testimony Thursday, Bellack dismissed his email as “late-night, jet-lag musings.” He said he didn’t think Google’s control over the buyer, seller and middleman was a problem, but he speculated about why some customers sought workarounds to Google’s technology.

Most current and former Google employees who have testified as government witnesses have similarly rejected their own written words.

Earlier this week, another Google executive, Nirmal Jayaram, devoted a significant portion of his testimony to distancing himself from views expressed in emails he wrote and articles and presentations he co-authored.

The Justice Department, of course, argues that what Google employees wrote in real time is a more accurate reflection of reality. And it says there would be even more damning documentary evidence if Google hadn’t systematically deleted many of the internal chats that employees used to discuss business, even after the company was notified it was under investigation.

Testimony showed that Google implemented a “Communicate with Care” policy under which employees were instructed to add company lawyers to confidential emails so they could be marked as “privileged” and exempt from disclosing the information to government regulators.

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema called Google’s document retention policy “completely inappropriate and inappropriate,” a remark she noted during the hearing, though she did not impose any specific penalty.

The Virginia trial began Sept. 9, just a month after a judge in the District of Columbia found Google’s core business, its ubiquitous search engine, to be an illegal monopoly. The trial is still ongoing to determine what remedies, if any, the judge can impose.

The advertising technology at issue in the Virginia lawsuit does not generate the same revenue for Google as its search engine, but it is still estimated to bring in tens of billions of dollars in revenue for the company each year.

The Virginia trial moved much faster than the D.C. case. The government presented witnesses for nine straight days and nearly wrapped up its case. The judge told Google to expect to begin presenting its own witnesses on Friday.