Breaking up (Google) is hard to do
Breaking the monopoly on Google’s advertising technology is, apparently, like going on Mars or trying to replace Michael Jordan – doubtfully possible and a huge amount of work.
These are some of the analogies that witnesses testified in the defense of Google told a federal judge this week while the company is mounting its second attempt to avoid a break. After having managed to beat this fate in the search case of the Ministry of Justice, Google pleaded for the judge of the district court based in Virginia, Leonie Brinkema, to let him keep his activity of advertising technology also intact. Along the way, Google Witness argued that it did not need to give up monopoly power to restore the competition it has damaged, and the judge gave mixed signals on the way it could reign.
The DoJ spent the previous week to argue that forcing an Adx Exchange advertising server and Google Open from its DoubleClick for Publishers advertising server (DFP) is both technically possible, and the only way to guarantee that Google does not find new ways to handle its domination to the detriment of the publisher’s customers. While Google filed his defense, he gathered a framework and an expert after the other to explain the extent of the project and warn that a break could simply introduce new problems.
“It’s a massive company,” said Google Ad Manager (GAM) director Glenn Berntson. Even if ADX disinvestment does not include tearing up other elements of the owner infrastructure of Google, it said, it was only marginally better. “Going to the moon is easier than going to Mars.” Other witnesses have testified to the long list of ways that Google says that rupture is more difficult than it seems: it is technically complex, it is not clear if Google employees would really work for an ADX buyer or simply leave, and customers could be injured in the process. “We are trying to replace Michael Jordan’s databases,” said Google’s technical expert Jason Nieh, pointing to one of the many Google owner services that Ad Tech tools should exchange if they were taken from the company. “There is only one Michael Jordan, and he is irreplaceable.”
“We try to replace the databases of Michael Jordan”
Brinkema has already judged that Google has illegally monopolized two markets for advertising tool publishers who count to generate income and have illegally linked them to its own business. Throughout Google’s defense, it was sometimes easy to lose track of this. Google’s economic expert Andres Lerner has shown a slide similar to that of Google used to argue its case in the previous responsibility trial, intended to defend the efficiency of the ADX and the DFP, the publishers, despite the fact that the witnesses of Brinkhema have already declared that Google publishers have also testified on the growth of the publication on the web.
What Google is (and is not) ready to abandon
The targeted changes in Google’s behavior are the most effective and least risky way to restore competition, said Google throughout its case, in particular through external witnesses such as the CEO of Wikihow Google Ad Tech, Tim Craycroft, even Rifflé on the concessions that Google had not initially offered to the “very open DF offer”. But it would not engage either on the stand to reduce the rate of taking by 20% of ADX, which the court judged higher than what would exist on a competitive market.
“I see a tension there”
Google will not even concede to the prohibition of certain commercial practices which she says that she does not currently use. Google does not use data from its other companies like YouTube or do not look for to feed its advertising technology activity, he says, but it wants the option open if it becomes an important way to compete. In fact, Google should not even have to abandon its monopoly power, as long as it stops using it unfairly, according to Lerner. Later, however, he said remedies should generally exceed the anti -competitive driving market. “What is incompatible with the concept that a certain monopoly power can continue,” replied Brinkema. “I see a tension there.”
Lerner has also rejected the idea that a remedy should prevent Google from creating a new similar anti-competitive path, but not identical, at its illegal DFP-Adx link, taking advantage of its request from the purchasing advertiser to reach the domination of the publisher’s side. Indeed, Brinkema did not find that the advertiser was anti-competitive in itself, he said, and the way Google created was not intrinsically illegal either.
To make his argument against this assertion, the DoJ used an impression that showed several roads leading to the word “monopoly” in a large red box with the Google logo at the top, and tried to show the potential ways that Google could recreate its monopoly power by bypassing the remedies offered by Google. “Everything we need now are the tokens, the little houses,” joked Brinkema.
What does the judge think?
A few days earlier, Brinkema raised what she called the “two elephants in the room” to find out if a breakup is really necessary. The first is that at the end of this procedure, Brinkema should make an order from the court on which Google could be held by the court if he refuses to follow. The second is that Google is already facing a prosecution dam and will probably be even more confronted. Will one of these chastiers punish the business?
Surely even Google would probably comply with an order of the court restricting its behavior on the advertising technology markets which it monopolized, testified Rajeev Goel, CEO of Rival ad Exchange Pubmatic. But the problem is to ensure that the order includes an exhaustive list in all ways in which Google could understand how new or unknown in a new or future. When PubMatic raised a technical problem to Google he was experiencing, Goel said he couldn’t know if the duration it took to repair was due to a road dam, or Google incentives to delay a solution to keep more money for itself. (A Google leader then testified on the work and the regular updates that she provided in Pubmatic on the fix.)
Brinkema’s questions and comments during the last week of the trial sent mixed signals on the way she thinks of the appropriate remedies, although it is difficult to say how much they have given an overview of her current thought. On the one hand, after an MJ lawyer said that At & T’s rupture has helped accelerate the development of mobile phones, Brinkema said: “Yes, but we lost Bell Labs. This is what people comment.” On the other hand, she later seemed to take over the witnesses of the DoJ hammering the importance of the structural remedies to prevent a regrowth of the Google monopoly. “Talking about driving is really not important,” she said, when what matters is to prevent Google from achieving domination again.
