Google’s antitrust lawsuit against the Department of Justice is coming to an end, but how has the “spaghetti football” defense held up?

The high-profile antitrust trial between Google and the US Department of Justice, which aims to prove the technology giant’s monopoly on the adtech industry, officially ended on September 27.

According to daily trial updates from the US v. Google website – run by industry watchdog Check My Ads – the parties are expected to submit amended “Findings of Fact” by November 4, with closing arguments scheduled for November 25. The trial began on September 9 and ended in the third week after Google presented its defense.

The tech giant’s defense has tried to prove there is competition in the advertising space, challenging the Justice Department’s market definitions and arguing that its practices are legal and help the industry as a whole.

Google suffered an unfortunate opening to its case when its lawyer Bill Isaacson questioned government expert Dr. Robin Lee for more than four hours, trying to expose weaknesses in his testimony. However, Dr. Lee’s expertise made it difficult to challenge the government’s position, and Judge Brinkema ultimately referred to the Google ad technology ecosystem as a “spaghetti ball” to emphasize its complexity.

Scott Sheffer, a Google vice president, was the first Google witness to testify about the ad tech ecosystem, but his testimony was met with skepticism as a chart showing the ad tech ecosystem became chaotic and drew laughter from observers, and Sheffer admitted that he was not the conscious term “open online display advertising.” Judge Brinkema also noted that his testimony referred to events “initiated after the initiation of the investigation.”

Other key testimony includes former Google CTO Nitish Korula, who said the company does not prevent competitors from bidding in real time but admitted they do not actively support them, and Google expert Paul Milgrom, who defended Google’s auction practices and testified that the actions companies in the years 2013-2019 were not anti-competitive.

Google Chief Financial Officer Jessica Mok also testified in the trial, trying to downplay the financial importance of the tech giant’s advertising technology, but the Justice Department questioned her over the transparency of Google’s revenue classification.

Economist Mark Israel also tried to argue that the advertising and technology market operated as a single two-sided market, but the Justice Department highlighted contradictions in his market definitions and revealed internal communications that pointed to Google’s competitive practices.

Google’s “last look” advantage.

Other testimony includes that of the Daily Mail’s chief digital officer, Matthew Wheatland, who testified about the challenges publishers face in the advertising industry and how Google AdX makes it difficult to negotiate favorable terms. He said Google has made direct sales more difficult and that Google’s “last-look” advantage creates an uneven playing field.

Testimony readings from Vox Media’s president of revenue and growth, Ryan Pauley, and Bryan Bumpers, marketing analytics manager at Zulily, also highlighted how Google’s market practices limit publishers’ control and create barriers to competition.

Relying on Google’s defense, Judge Brinkema noted that the tech giant’s witnesses were questionable because they were associated with the company and their testimony appeared rehearsed and overly favorable to Google. She also pointed to a problem with Google’s market definitions and the fact that the company focused more on potential remedies than on liability.

By comparison, the Justice Department’s defense sought to prove how Google’s dominance harmed competition, with key testimony from industry experts including Gannett’s Tim Wolfe and IndexExchange’s Andrew Casale, who discussed the competitive disadvantages resulting from Google’s dominance and former Google vice president Eisar Lipkovitz, who criticized the company’s practices as requiring regulation.

Sarah Kay Wiley, chief policy officer at Check My Ads, said the industry watchdog was “confident” that Google’s overlapping monopolies would be broken up based on the events of the trial and that the Justice Department had presented a thorough and compelling case.

She said: “Once again we have seen Google try tricks to hide its anti-competitive behavior. What Google employees wrote in internal emails was completely different from what they said in court. Judge Brinkema also discovered this.”

Is Google too big to fail?

In an interview with Mi3, S4 Capital founder Sir Martin Sorrell talked about global tech players and said that trying to regulate platforms like Google may be futile because they have grown bigger than the companies that try to govern them. He added that large platforms, due to their size and influence, can only be regulated through local government.

He said: “These are no longer companies, these are countries. “AI will make (them) even more important, so self-regulation will be absolutely key.”

This article first appeared in Campaign’s sister publication, Performance Marketing World.