Google argues that it faces fierce competition from Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and others. It also asserts that customers benefit from each acquisition, contract, and feature the government is challenging. “Google has designed a suite of products that work well together and attract valuable customers,” the company’s lawyers wrote in the suit. a 359-page rebuttal.
For years, Google has publicly maintained that its ad tech projects will not harm customers or competitors. “We will be able to help publishers and advertisers generate more revenue, which will drive the creation of more rich and diverse content on the internet,” Drummond testified in 2007 to U.S. senators concerned about the impact of the DoubleClick deal on competition and privacy. U.S. antitrust regulators at the time Purchase deleted. But at least one of themLooking back, he said he should have blocked it.
Deep control
The Justice Department alleges that the DoubleClick acquisition has given Google “a captive group of publishers who now have fewer alternatives and face significant switching costs associated with moving to another publisher’s ad server.” Google’s global market share of publisher tools is now 91 percent, according to court papers. The company similarly controls the ad exchanges that broker it (about 70 percent) and the tools used by advertisers (85 percent), court papers say.
The government argues that Google’s dominance has “undermined the ability of publishers and advertisers to choose the ad technology tools they want to use and reduced the number and quality of viable options they can use.”
The government alleges that Google employees discussed internally that they were earning an unfair share of the money advertisers spent on ads, in some cases as much as a third of every $1 spent.
Some of Google’s competitors want the tech giant to be broken up into several independent companies, so each of its advertising services competes on its own merits without the benefit of one side boosting the other. Rivals also support rules that would prohibit Google from favoring its own services. “What everyone in the industry is looking for is fair competition,” said Vanderhook of Viant.
If Google’s ad tech alternatives win more business, not everyone is sure users will notice the difference. “We’re talking about moving from the NYSE to the Nasdaq,” Ari Paparo, a former DoubleClick and Google executive who now runs the media company Marketecture, told WIRED. The technology behind the scenes may change, but the experience for investors—or, in this case, internet surfers—won’t.
Some advertising experts predict that if Google is broken up, the user experience will get even worse. Andrey Meshkov, chief technology officer of ad-blocking company AdGuard, predicts that tracking will become more invasive as competition intensifies. The products could also become more expensive, as companies not only need to hire more people to run ads but also buy more ads to hit the same targets. “So the ad clutter is going to get worse,” Beth Egan, an advertising executive turned associate professor at Syracuse University, told reporters on a recent call. a Google-funded advocacy group.
But Dina Srinivasan, a former advertising executive who writes as an antitrust scholar A Stanford Technology Law Review article on Google’s dominancesaid advertisers would pay lower rates and the savings would be passed on to their customers. That future would mark the end of the curse that Google allegedly created with its DoubleClick deal. And that could happen even if Google wins in Virginia. A court in a similar case filed by Texas, 15 other states and Puerto Rico is expected in March.
