The US vs. Google adtech antitrust trial ended last week after nearly a month. Closing arguments are set for November 25, with a ruling expected by year-end. With the trial officially wrapped, Google wants to make sure the market understands its side of the story.
On Friday, Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s Vice President of Regulatory Affairs, published a blog post titled “Key takeaways from the ad tech trial.” The main points include:
- Google claims its strategies benefit the entire digital advertising market.
- They argue their integrated ad technologies improve efficiency for advertisers and publishers.
- Google states most practices under scrutiny are outdated and replaced by newer technologies.
- They assert their ad tech stack is superior in cost, safety, and effectiveness.
- Google emphasizes lower fees compared to industry averages.
- They refute monopoly claims by pointing to competition from Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft.
- Google argues header bidding remains competitive and beneficial to the ecosystem.
“After a three-week trial, it’s clear that the DOJ’s case missed the forest for the trees,” says Mulholland. “There’s intense competition in ad tech, where ad buyers and sellers have plenty of choice. And Google’s services have helped publishers, advertisers, and consumers.”
Why This Matters:
How does this compare to Google’s pre-trial blog post that outlined its planned arguments?
The messages are pretty consistent. Both posts argue that the ad tech market is very competitive, even with Google in it, while highlighting Google’s cooperation with other companies, and the diversity of options in market. Google also maintained its practices benefitted the wider ad industry, pointing to lower-than-average fees and its interoperability. The pre-trial post introduced these arguments and the post-trial post backed them up with evidence from the trial, with few surprises. (We were not there so this is based on our outside view.)
Question: do brands care about this case? Maybe not, at least for now. Many are taking a wait-and-see approach, focusing on how the outcome might directly affect them. Their primary concern is whether the ruling will significantly change how they buy ads or access inventory. That remains uncertain, at least until the end of the year.
Experts React:
The general consensus seems to be that Google “lost” the trial arguments, with an Ars Technica headline blaring: “Not a good look: Google’s ad tech monopoly defense widely criticized.” However, opinions do, indeed, vary.
Last week, Matt Barash posted on X that “by all accounts, witness testimony and evidence hasn’t persuaded me” that Google is an adtech monopoly. Meanwhile, Terry Kawaja suggests that even if Google loses, it might not be detrimental for anyone, and “guilty is good.” In fact, he argues a breakup of Google would benefit everyone, including Google. “This would be a positive for Google as it rids them of their business unit with the slowest growth,” says Kawaja, the unit with “the lowest margins, and the biggest source of government headaches.”
One of the most insightful and possibly existential takes, in our view, came from Ari Paparo, who wrote a few weeks ago on the evidence presented: “There are lots of emails trying to optimize the situation, balancing the desire to make publisher customers happy versus maximizing revenues. But I’m yet to see any email that says “maybe we should just not do this anymore and take the hit to revenue.”” (That would be manager mode, Ari, not founder mode.)
Our Take:
A random albeit interesting observation regarding the testimonies—they, in a way, showcased how competitive the adtech market actually is? Companies like Magnite, PubMatic, and Criteo, which are publicly traded and were not snuffed out by a monopoly, demonstrate that there is clear competition in market. Is it stunted by Google? Of course. But the fact that there were a number of large adtech companies featured might say something in itself.
This touches on one of the more bizarre moments of the trial, in our view, when a former NewsCorp executive, now at Amazon, suggested Google’s adtech should be open source. This comment stands out as Amazon competes directly with Google, and you have to wonder if it reinforced that competition does, indeed, exist here, and from massive companies and everything in-between.
