The court will soon decide whether Google’s advertising technology business is an illegal monopoly – channelnews

Google is lagging behind because it was forced to justify its position in court, claiming that it does not operate its advertising business as an illegal monopoly and that it has competition in this space.

A federal antitrust lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice claims that Google has monopolized technology used to buy and sell ads on websites, harming publishers and advertisers in the process.

Google technologies offer advertisers and publishers a secure ecosystem of tools to transact in the fiercely competitive world of online advertising, the company argued in federal court last week, countering the Justice Department’s claims that it is an illegal monopoly.

In a federal antitrust lawsuit, law enforcement agencies accuse Google of monopolizing technology used to buy and sell ads on websites, harming publishers and advertisers in the process.

The trial ended on Friday. Judge Leonie Brinkema has scheduled closing arguments for November 25 and intends to issue a ruling before the end of the year.

“Google will never tell this court that it is not a large company and that these investments and innovations are not in its financial interest. That was the case,” Karen Dunn, Google’s general counsel, said in opening statements. “We are one large company among many others, competing intensely millisecond by millisecond for every ad impression.”

The court heard damaging testimony that could tilt the case in the U.S. government’s favor. In 2009, for example, a top Google executive told colleagues that the goal of the company’s then-nascent online advertising industry was to “crush” competing ad networks. “We’ll be able to crush other networks, and that’s our goal,” said David Rosenblatt, Google’s former president of display advertising. Rosenblatt joined Google in 2008 when the company acquired his former ad technology company, DoubleClick, and left a year later. Notes from his speech showed him discussing the advantages of having technology on both sides and in the middle of the market. “We are both Goldman and the NYSE,” he said, he said. “Google has created something that can be compared to the New York or London Stock Exchange; in other words, we will do this to display the search results made by Google,” Rosenblatt said.

Google’s defense that it had credible competition was also shattered when Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook, struck a deal with Google in 2018 after admitting internally that it had no chance against Google’s monopoly on the technology behind its display on the Internet advertising. Brian Boland, who headed Facebook’s ad technology division from 2009 to 2019, told the court that the social networking site initially aimed to directly challenge Google in the market for display advertising sold on websites, Bloomberg reports.

The goal of the Facebook Audience Network was to allow marketers to show ads on the company’s social networks, Facebook and Instagram, and purchase them on websites and apps.

However, by 2017, Facebook had concluded that it would have an uphill battle to successfully compete with Alphabet’s Google due to its “monopoly” and the advantage the search giant secured in its advertising tools.

During questioning by the Department of Justice, Google’s vice president of global partnerships, Scott Sheffer, admitted that the AdSense or AdX Direct platforms do not provide the same access as if a publisher were using a Google ad server because only it receives real-time pricing information.

Google lawyers said the company had a legitimate business reason to tightly integrate products into its advertising empire: It made it easier for engineers to reduce spam and ad fraud, benefiting the entire advertising ecosystem.

The company argued that opening up its tools to outside rivals too quickly could make it easier for some to exploit the system and profit from ad fraud.

Google also argued that U.S. law protects the company’s right to decide whether its advertising and tech products work with others. Forcing Google to provide technology and resources that allow its ad technology to work seamlessly with competitors’ tools would stifle innovation, a company lawyer said.

The government is trying to force Google to share its customers with competitors, said Dunn, Google’s general counsel. When the government states that “competitive exchanges must have comparable access to Google Ads demand,” she said, “that is our customer base.”

Mark Israel, Google’s chief economic expert, said that forcing Google to give competitors the same access to its tools would harm competition and amount to “forced interoperability.”

“I think the Justice Department has the upper hand and a finding of liability is more likely,” said Justin Teresi, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst who attended the hearing.