Google believes it faces stiff competition from Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and others. It further asserts that customers have benefited from every acquisition, contract, and feature challenged by the government. “Google has designed a set of products that work well with each other and attract a valuable customer base,” the company’s lawyers wrote in a 359-page rebuttal.
For years, Google has publicly maintained that its ad tech projects will not harm clients or competition. “We can help publishers and advertisers generate more revenue, which will stimulate the creation of richer and more diverse content on the internet,” Drummond testified in 2007 to US senators concerned about the DoubleClick deal’s impact on competition and privacy. US antitrust regulators at the time cleared the purchase. But at least one of them, in retrospect, says he should have blocked it.
Deep Control
The Department of Justice says that the acquisition of DoubleClick gave Google “a group of captive 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 the publisher tool is now 91 percent, according to court papers. The company holds similar control over ad exchanges brokered (about 70 percent) and tools used by advertisers (85 percent), court filings say.
Google’s dominance, the government argued, “undermined the ability of publishers and advertisers to choose the ad tech tools they prefer to use and reduced the number and quality of available options available to them.”
The government says Google staffers are talking internally about how they earn an unfair share of what advertisers spend on advertising, up to more than a third of every $1 spent in some cases.
Some of Google’s competitors want the tech giant to be split into multiple independent companies, so each of its advertising services competes on its own merits without one benefiting from the bombardment of the other. Rivals also support rules that would prevent Google from choosing its own services. “What everyone in the industry is looking for is fair competition,” Viant’s Vanderhook said.
If alternatives to Google ad tech win more business, not everyone is sure users will notice a difference. “We’re talking about moving from NYSE to Nasdaq,” Ari Paparo, a former DoubleClick and Google executive who now runs media company Marketecture, told WIRED. The technology behind the scenes may change, but the experience for investors—or in this case, internet surfers—has not.
Some advertising experts predict that if Google breaks up, users’ experiences will worsen. Andrey Meshkov, chief technology officer of ad-block developer AdGuard, expects increasingly invasive monitoring as competition intensifies. Products can also be more expensive because companies need to not only hire more help to run ads but also buy more ads to achieve the same goals. “So ad clutter is going to get worse,” Beth Egan, an ad executive turned Syracuse University associate professor, told reporters on a recent call organized by an advocacy group funded by Google.
But Dina Srinivasan, a former ad executive who as an antitrust scholar wrote a Stanford Technology Law Review paper on Google’s dominance, said advertisers would pay lower fees, and the savings would be passed on to their customers. That future will end the spell that Google allegedly cast with its DoubleClick deal. And it could happen even if Google wins in Virginia. A trial in a similar case filed by Texas, 15 other states, and Puerto Rico is scheduled for March.
