Google says it faces fierce competition from Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and others. It also claims that customers have benefited from each of the acquisitions, contracts and features the government is challenging. “Google has designed a set of products that work together effectively and attract a valuable customer base,” the company’s lawyers wrote in a 359-page response.
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 fuel the creation of even richer and more 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 have since approved the purchase. But at least one of themIn retrospect, he said he should have blocked it.
Deep control
The Justice Department says the acquisition of DoubleClick gave Google “a group of publishers that now had fewer alternatives and faced significant switching costs associated with switching to another publisher’s ad server.” Google’s publisher tool now has a global market share of 91 percent, according to court documents. The company has similar control over ad exchanges that broker deals (about 70 percent) and tools used by advertisers (85 percent), the court documents say.
The government says Google’s dominant position “has limited the ability of publishers and advertisers to choose their preferred advertising technology tools and has reduced the number and quality of options available to them.”
The government alleges that Google employees told the company internally that the company was getting an unfair share of what advertisers spent on advertising – in some cases, more than a third of every dollar spent.
Some of Google’s competitors want to split the tech giant into multiple independent companies so that each of its ad services can compete on its own terms, without benefiting from being pumped up by one another. Rivals also support rules that would prevent Google from favoring its own services. “The entire industry is looking for fair competition,” says Viant’s Vanderhook.
If Google’s ad tech alternatives do attract more customers, not everyone is confident that users will notice the difference. “We’re talking about going from the NYSE to the Nasdaq,” Ari Paparo, a former DoubleClick and Google executive who now runs the media company Marketecture, tells WIRED. The technology behind the scenes may change, but the experience of investors—or in this case, Internet users—hasn’t.
Some advertising experts predict that if Google breaks up, the user experience will get even worse. Andrey Meshkov, chief technology officer at AdGuard, a maker of ad blockers, expects increasingly intrusive tracking as competition intensifies. Products could also cost more, because companies not only have to hire additional facilitate to serve ads but also buy more ads to achieve the same goals. “So the ad clutter is going to get worse,” Beth Egan, an advertising executive and now an associate professor at Syracuse University, told reporters during a recent call organized by Google-funded advocacy group.
But Dina Srinivasan, a former advertising executive and antitrust expert, wrote: Stanford Technology Law Review article on Google’s dominancesays advertisers will ultimately pay lower fees, with the savings passed on to their customers. Such a future would spell the end of the spell that Google supposedly cast with its DoubleClick deal. And it could happen even if Google wins in Virginia. The lawsuit in a similar lawsuit Filing by Texas, 15 other states and Puerto Rico is scheduled for March.