Google defends ad tech as safe, says it rivals Meta, Amazon

A wide open digital landscape

The government alleges that Google dominates the market for display ads shown on websites. But Google says that is just a slice of the digital advertising world today, where brands can connect with consumers on social media, in apps and on streaming video.

Israel, the Google economic expert, said advertisers can and do switch between different advertising formats, and the government should have considered advertising on apps, social media, video, and connected TV, which accounted for $140 billion spent in the US in 2022.

“Facebook, Amazon, TikTok are becoming the strongest players” in digital advertising, he said, adding that Google views them as “serious competitive threats,” where advertisers are shifting their money as needed.

Brian Bumpers, the marketing analytics manager for ecommerce site Zulily, said the company often shifts the $58 million it spends a year on advertising among different places. In 2016, Zulily spent $30 million on Google Ads, but dropped that to about $10 million the next year and increased its spending on Facebook’s platforms to $30 million.

‘No legal obligation’ to help rivals

Google believed that US law protects the company’s right to choose whether to make its ad tech products work with others. Forcing Google to provide technology and resources to make its ad tech work seamlessly with rival tools would stifle innovation, the company’s lawyer said.

The government is seeking to force Google to share its customers with competitors, said Dunn, Google’s lead lawyer.

When the government says “that rival exchanges need to have comparable access to Google Ads demand,” she said, “that’s our customer base.”

Israel, the Google economic expert, said making Google provide rivals with the same access to its tools would harm competition and amount to “forced interoperability.”

Google’s ad exchange AdX was built before real-time bidding was developed, said Korula, the engineering director. “It would take years to rebuild” Google’s exchange to allow that functionality, he said.

“We didn’t prevent other exchanges from submitting real-time bids” into the ad server, Korula said. No company ever offered to undertake the technical work and expense to make their exchanges work with Google’s products, he said.

The Justice Department considers that Google has already undertaken much of the technological work that needs to happen to make its products operate seamlessly with rivals.

In 2019, it started a project internally code-named Project Yavin to connect its exchange to the in-house ad servers operated by Microsoft’s LinkedIn and eBay Inc. It has also already let its ad network, Google Ads, bid on certain types of ads in other exchanges and could expand that feature more broadly.