Google’s in the middle of its antitrust case in just as many months, after it lost a landmark trial in August over anticompetitive search practices. This time around, the DOJ is claiming Google has another illegal monopoly in the online advertising market. Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner has been on the ground at the courthouse to hear testimony from news publishers, advertising experts, and Google executives to make sense of it — and, ultimately, to see whether a federal judge hands the company another antitrust defeat. Links: Google and DOJ return for round two of their antitrust fight | The Verge Judge rules that Google ‘is a monopolist’ in US antitrust case | The Verge In US v. Google, YouTube’s CEO defends the Google way The Verge Google and the DOJ’s ad tech fight is all about control | The Verge How Google altered a deal with publishers who couldn’t say no | The Verge Google dominates online ads, says antitrust trial witness, but publishers are feeling ‘stuck’ | The Verge US considers a rare antitrust move: breaking up Google | Bloomberg This deal helped turn Google into an ad powerhouse. Is that a problem? | NYT Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I. Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, we're talking about the big Google antitrust trial that's currently taking place in a federal courthouse. No, not the one you're thinking of. It's the second Google antitrust case in just as many months.
The company lost a landmark case in August in which a court ruled that it had an illegal monopoly in search. This time around, the Department of Justice is claiming that Google has another illegal monopoly in the online advertising market. Unlike the search case, the ads case is both extremely complicated and somewhat harder to see.
We all use search all day, and we're surrounded by online ads all day. But while it's easy to talk about search, no one really wants to think about how the ads get there or how much they really cost.
And there's added complexity here because of the intricate relationship between Google's ad products and its search engine, which afforded Google the scale and resources and quite honestly cash flow to grow far faster than its competition. especially through aggressive acquisitions.
See, while Google figured out how to put ads on the search results page all by itself, it had to acquire its expertise in many of the other forms of online advertising like display and video ads by buying competitors.
It then spent many years integrating and combining those companies and their products into a wildly complicated system known as an ad tech stack, basically an all-in-one shop for businesses and websites of all sizes to buy and sell ads, creating, arguably, the world's most sophisticated digital ad network.
To hear the rest of the industry tell it, Google maintained the dominance of that network pretty ruthlessly. Most people just see the cuddly side of Google, not the side that makes money. And that side is just as cutthroat and competitive as any big business.
Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner has been at the courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, basically every day this month to hear testimony from news publishers, advertising experts, and Google executives that make sense of what's going on. And ultimately, to see whether a federal judge hands Google another antitrust defeat.
So I asked Lauren to join the show this week to help me break it all down and get her take on which direction she thinks this case is headed next. Before we get into it, though, I want to take a moment to zoom out to the big picture. There's a lot of vocabulary here, and don't worry, I'm not going to explain all the fine details of how internet advertising works.
But there's a few key ideas we should go over just so we're up to speed on the terminology that's getting thrown around in this courtroom. At the heart of the trial here is the market for what we call web display advertising. At a high level, display advertising is the cornerstone of the digital ad market and the oldest form of advertising we have on the internet.
It started back in the early 90s with the banner ad, and it's expanded from there to include a variety of different ad formats. When you're reading a website, the ads you see most often are display ads, and the market leader there is Google. And while Google now has a lot of different kinds of ads, from search ads to video ads on YouTube, this case doesn't concern those.
It's focused on the display ads, how they get there, and how much they cost. Behind every display ad is a supplier, the news publisher, the website owner, whoever owns the boxes on the web pages that are being filled with ads. On the other side, there's a customer, usually a company trying to sell a product or service, someone who wants to fill those boxes.
In the middle sit the ad exchanges, which facilitate the buying and selling of ads at massive scale. Companies like Google with its Google Ads and AdSense platforms and competitors like Pubmatic. But over time, Google has come to own virtually every piece of the ad tech stack, not just the exchanges. but also the tech used on both sides of the ad transaction.
As online advertising became more sophisticated over time, companies like Google began to experiment with technology that would automate those transactions at ever greater scale and speed through automated bidding. Think of it like countless split-second auctions that are happening across the entire internet all day, every day, often for just pennies per click. The money is in the scale.
Google recorded $238 billion in ad revenue last year, primarily from the ad products that power its search engine and the huge swaths of the web that use its related display and video ad products.
You're going to hear Lauren talk about all of these terms, and in particular, you'll hear her talk about a company called DoubleClick, which Google purchased in 2007, and how it eventually formed the backbone of an exchange called AdX.
Virtually all of these platforms and services have since been combined and rebranded into more generic-sounding Google products, but the technology at the heart is what regulators argue allowed Google to consolidate power in unprecedented fashion. Okay, Google's big antitrust fight over ads. Here we go. Lauren Feiner, welcome to Decoder.
Thanks for having me.
Let's start at a very basic level. What is this case? Who's suing Google? What's it about? Where's it being heard?
This trial is about Google's advertising technology business, and that's a business where Google has a role in several different parts of the market. Basically, you have the publisher side, you have the advertiser side, and you have the technology that sits in the middle and facilitates the buying and selling of ad inventory.
The government's basically saying that Google has maintained an illegal monopoly in a couple of these different parts of the advertising technology stack and also illegally tied together two of its tools to entrench that power. In this lawsuit, there's still the Department of Justice. They're really leading the questioning of the witnesses so far in this case.
You also have, I think, somewhere over a dozen witnesses state attorneys general that have signed on to the DOJ's case. The government is making four key arguments in this case. They're saying that Google first monopolized the market for the publisher ad server, which is the publisher side tool used to sell ad space on the internet.
They've also monopolized the market for ad exchanges, which is the technology that sits in the middle and facilitates buying and selling. And then for the ad network, which is basically the large advertiser base that Google has that provides buying demand to its platform.
And the fourth argument is that Google has illegally tied together its publisher ad server and its ad exchange, leveraging the dominance of both of those to extend its monopoly power.
Presumably Google disagrees with all this. What's their response?
Google has said that the government really gets this wrong. They're not understanding the space, that they have plenty of competition here, that advertising tech is an industry that's alive and well, and that it just happens to exist. have these tools that have certain efficiencies with each other that ultimately benefit the industry.
We haven't really gotten to hear their case in full yet because right now the government is going through its witnesses. And after that, we'll get to hear more of Google's side of the story. But we did get to hear a little bit of this in opening arguments.
Google already lost a big federal antitrust case once this year in search. What makes this case different from that one?
In the Google search case, that was a case about essentially Google's contracts with browser makers and phone makers that would make Google search the default on their platforms. Ultimately, the judge in that case ruled that Google did illegally monopolize the search market and that while it's true that consumers could change the defaults on these browsers or phones, that it was the
clear to the judge that Google intended to illegally monopolize this market and box out competitors from being able to really gain a foothold in this space. So that's a case that's currently in the remedies phase. So they're figuring out What's the government going to ask for in order to solve this harm that the judge found in this case? The arguments in these cases, they're pretty different.
They're different industries in a sense, although, of course, the popularity of Google really arises from its search product. But I don't know if it necessarily tells us the full story of how the judge might approach this case because it is a different industry. It's a different set of facts.
Are these cases related at all? Do they stem from the same investigation or is it just two totally different things?
I would say it's more akin to two separate avenues, just because the first case, the search case, was filed under the Trump administration. The second case was filed under the Biden administration. The Biden administration did continue to carry out the search trial when that administration took over. So I don't think there's necessarily a dispute in how necessarily they think about these markets.
But They are different cases. They kind of stemmed from different administrations. But that said, you know, there is something that's a little bit odd about talking about the advertising technology business in isolation just because a lot of the demand that, especially in Google's advertising network, comes from the popularity of search.
And, you know, I think search is really what Google's popularity in general has always stemmed from. But I do think it's significant that we see in 2024 a federal judge saying the antitrust laws can be applied to a tech platform to say that this company illegally monopolized the market, because we haven't seen that in a really long time.
The search case was heard in a federal court in Washington, D.C. Is this one in the same court with the same judge? And how long is this thing going to take? Because the other case was filed during the Trump administration, which means it took four years for it to trial, and it's still not over.
This case is in Alexandria of the Eastern District of Virginia. The Eastern District of Virginia actually has kind of a funny nickname in legal circles. It's known as the Rocket Docket because it's known for moving cases relatively quickly. And I think that is pretty much what we've seen here. It is being overseen by Judge Leonie Brinkema. My understanding is she's a highly respected judge.
I think she's been very, very matter of fact, very straight to the point. She doesn't want to hear a lot of repetition of arguments or repetition of concepts that she's heard from witnesses. I think the questions I've heard her ask so far seem to indicate that she understands this market. She's getting a grasp of the technical elements of this case, and she wants to keep it moving.
I think we've seen that a lot in the arguments so far. It started last Monday. So far, it's been basically a week of trial, and it's been every single day. of the work week. It could go up to six weeks. It seems like that's not going to happen. I'd say it's probably going to go, I would guess, at least another couple weeks, but I wouldn't imagine they're going to take the full six weeks.
It sounded like the DOJ might wrap up its case in chief this week, at which point Google will begin bringing in witnesses.
Speaking of length, we have to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
Bye.
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Welcome back. I'm talking to Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner about Google's current antitrust case, separate and apart from the one it already lost about search last month. The Justice Department gets to bring all of its witnesses in first to this trial. It's been doing that last week and this week. Lauren, you've been in court virtually every day watching that unfold.
What kind of witnesses is the Department of Justice bringing in?
There's been several groups of different types of witnesses so far. We've heard from publishers. We've heard from people on the buying side who represent agencies that buy ads for clients. We've heard from one expert so far, and we've also heard from former Google executives who've worked in parts of the ad tech business. On the publisher side, one that really stood out to me was
Stephanie Lacer, who was a former News Corp executive, who spoke pretty passionately about the issues that she had with Google's publisher side tools and feeling locked into their whole technology ecosystem, despite issues that she had with it. We've heard from former Google executives like a former Southside executive, Chris LaSalla.
We saw several documents from him and colleagues that kind of underscored Google's understanding that publishers were not So happy with the kind of fees that were charged for selling ad space through their technology. So yeah, we've heard from a whole range of different people across the industry, both inside and outside of Google.
And it seems like the government is trying to paint this picture that Google employees understood the kinds of pushback that they were getting, particularly from the publisher side and trying to show the kind of impact that Google's alleged monopoly power had on particularly the publishing industry.
Acquisitions have definitely been a major theme here. Google started out as just a search engine 25-ish years ago, but it quickly acquired its way into being a major advertising player. Has that come up?
There's a couple of acquisitions that are mentioned in this case, but I think really the most important one is Google's acquisition of DoubleClick, which kind of brought over the publisher ad server and helped Google build out its ad exchange.
And those are the two pieces of technology that the government is saying Google has illegally tied together to basically lock in customers and make it really difficult to switch to another ad. ad tech tool and just compound its dominance in the market.
A lot of people think letting Google acquire DoubleClick just wasn't a great idea, especially now that Google has allegedly used it in a monopolist kind of fashion. Did it get looked at at the time?
The FTC did review this acquisition, but they ultimately decided to let it go through. And when that happens, I think to the general public, they might see that an agency lets an acquisition go through. It means they kind of put their stamp of approval on it. That's not entirely how it works.
If the FTC or the DOJ antitrust division lets an acquisition go through, it basically just means that they're choosing not to challenge it right now, but they always have the right to challenge it in the future. Of course, that could be more complicated for many reasons. And there's also the problem of, you know, it's difficult to unscramble the eggs. That's a common phrase in antitrust.
Once everything is mixed together,
Right after Lauren talked to us for this episode, another major witness took the stand. Neil Mohan is now the CEO of YouTube. He's actually been on Decoder before, but he joined Google as part of the DoubleClick acquisition way back in 2008. The DOJ's lawyers brought Mohan in to grill him about something called parking.
Basically, the government's claim is that Google uses its immense market power and resources to buy up any company that looks like it could become a competitor in the ad tech space, and then basically sets it aside. Instead of using the company, the tech, or the people, Google allegedly just parks it out of the way somewhere so it can't cause any trouble.
So DoubleClick and a ton of other small companies are part of Google now. They scrambled the eggs, you can't unscramble them. What is the DOJ's argument about what Google's doing with all of that power?
In opening arguments, the government basically laid out three different ways that Google behaved that it said was, quote, straight out of the classic monopolist playbook. Really what it comes down to is control. That's really the government's main narrative in its opening arguments of this case. So they said first they control the competition by buying competitors like DoubleClick.
Then they control customers by locking them in through these tying arrangements or other kinds of programs that they put in place. And then they control the rules so that, quote, all roads lead back to Google. This is how the government's attorney laid it out on the first day of arguments in this case.
You spent a lot of time in your reporting during the first week of the trial talking about something called UPR. Can you expand on that? What does that mean? Why does it matter?
UPR stands for Unified Pricing Rules. Basically, Google put unified pricing rules in place in About 2019, it requires publishers to set the same minimum bid that it would accept from ad exchanges across all the ad exchanges that it's looking at. Basically, the ad exchange will deliver a bid on advertising space and there's Google's AdEx, there's other ad exchanges out there.
And what publishers had been doing was basically saying, okay, we'll accept, let's say, a dollar bid from all of these other ad exchanges. But for Google, our minimum bid that we'll accept from Google's AdEx is $1.05. And that means if another ad exchange, let's say Pubmatic, had a bid of a dollar, it would accept that.
But if it had a bid of a dollar from Google's AdEx, then that wouldn't be accepted. The reason that publishers did this, or one big reason that publishers did this, was because they wanted to diversify their revenue. They didn't want all of their revenue coming from Google, because any business might think about, if you're getting all of your revenue from one customer,
It's a risky position to be in because what if that customer goes away? What if something happens that cuts you off from that source of revenue? So publishers were doing this to lower their risk in this way. Google understood this, but also felt like this was something that was negative for publishers. its own standing. And so it came up with unified pricing rules.
In documents we saw in court, Google executives understood that publishers would not be happy with this change, and they did roll it out with some other changes that they felt publishers would be satisfied with. The government framed this as softening the blow to publishers in changing these rules.
Why did Google have those rules? Were they designed to keep customers from going to competing ad exchanges?
I wouldn't say it was necessarily to keep them from going to competing ad exchanges because publishers will work with several ad exchanges at the same time because they receive bids from these different ad exchanges. But I think they recognized that the publishers were trying to reduce their reliance on Google and they worried about the long-term impact of that kind of activity.
behavior on their business. And they wanted to even the playing field in their eyes of how Google's AddX was treated compared to other ad exchanges. But I think the reason we've heard from publishers of why it was so difficult to walk away from Google's AddX and why many felt like it was not a real possibility to walk away from AddX was that
It delivers what in the industry they call unique demand from Google's advertising network. When they say unique demand, they basically mean having this really full access to this huge base of advertisers that come through Google's ad network. The ad network demand is only available in real time with real time prices through Google's ad exchange, AdEx.
And while there are kind of ways to try to get at Google's ad network base, it's not really possible to access it in the same full way as it is through Google's AdEx. And that's where some of the concerns come in around tying and leveraging the different parts of the market against one another. Basically, publishers have told the court it was really hard to negotiate with Google.
And, you know, while you might be able to get a better deal with, you know, some other companies, Google really wouldn't really wiggle much. And I think the government is trying to say that's because they didn't have to because they had a dominant position here. They didn't feel the kind of pricing pressure that other companies did.
We have to take another quick break.
We'll be right back.
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Welcome back. Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner is here explaining what's going on with Google's big ad tech antitrust case. The case is still happening. It's about to wrap up its second week of government witnesses, and then Google will be able to present its side of things for a few weeks. It's definitely too early to say how this case might play out.
But looking forward, if Google should end up losing this case, what kind of outcomes do you think we might see?
Well, search is obviously the part of Google's business that I think the general consumer knows best. The advertising technology business is really important for Google. It's a big way that they make money. It's a big way that people in the publishing and advertising space interact with Google. I think it is really significant if they lose this case at the same time.
I talked to an antitrust professor prior to this trial beginning who said none of this will really be the end of Google, so to speak. But I think it could really change who the big players in this market could be.
Meanwhile, we're still waiting on the remedies portion of the search case to play out. There's been some reporting that the DOJ is considering requesting a full breakup of Google, but it doesn't have to officially submit its suggested penalties to the court until the end of the year. So that's going to take a while.
Is there any chance the outcomes in that case could affect the ruling in the ad tech case?
Obviously, judges are humans, and I'm sure Judge Brinkema is fully aware of what happened in the search case. But these are different cases. They're different business, different set of facts. So I'm pretty sure that Judge Brinkema is going to look at this. case pretty independently. And the remedies in the search case, that's a whole other proceeding that's going to happen.
Google's also going to appeal that ruling. And it's going to take a long time for all of this to be sorted out as this trial is ongoing, too. So I don't know how soon we will get the search remedies answer in general as well.
There's a lot going on in the antitrust world right now. The amount of enforcement has just ballooned these last few years. Since the 80s until pretty recently, companies have been allowed to get bigger and more powerful. But regulators around the world, including Lena Kahn at the FTC and Jonathan Cantor at the DOJ, have been aggressively pushing back.
We've had Cantor on the show a couple times this year, most recently right after Google lost the search antitrust case. What's interesting about the Google cases is that they're not just the first ones to get across the finish line. They're some of the first to really even get past the starting line. For more than five years, we've heard federal regulators are looking at Amazon, Meta, and Apple.
And while some suits have been filed, no other cases have been heard in court. Is there a reason that the Google cases have gotten the farthest the fastest?
That's a really great question. I guess I don't entirely know why Google is the one that's gone first or been such a big focus this time around. But I think part of it might be, you know, they have such a sprawling business. And it was an area that the government was able to home in on with many, many, many documents that they were able to get a hold of in their investigation and discovery. And
Maybe that's where they felt like they had the strongest case earliest on, and that's what they went after. So I think a lot of times what it comes down to is just what is the strongest case that they feel like they can bring? And, you know, it happened to be Google in these first two instances. All of those companies have lawsuits filed against them from the federal enforcers.
Those are making their way through court. Generally, antitrust cases are pretty slow moving. Like I said, this ad tech case is relatively quick, and that's still like a year and a half or so from filing to trial. So, you know, when that's quick, it gives you a sense of the timeline for these other matters. The rest of them are moving along, but...
We're just going to have to wait for the trial date.
In your reporting, have you gotten any sense of what the remedies in this case might look like if Google loses?
I think it's still pretty early to say because right now the judge is looking at whether Google violated these laws to begin with.
But I think in this case, compared to the search case, the lines where the government might seek to break apart Google's business seem a little bit clearer just because it's looking at these three different markets, the ad tech space, the ad exchange, and the buying side. I think there's kind of ways to cleave those at each point. So it's just...
Not to say that that's necessarily what should happen or what the government will ultimately go for, but I think it's easier to see in this case where different segments of the business might be attempted to pull apart.
The Justice Department isn't the only entity that's mad at Google, right? After the search trial ended, we saw some companies immediately pipe up and take advantage of the situation, either in press releases or kind of kicking Google while it was down, or actual lawsuits like one we saw from Yelp. Obviously, the search business is more visible from the outside than the ad business.
But have you seen any companies or organizations or witnesses that might target Google with their own lawsuits about ad stuff if Google loses this case too?
We heard from former News Corp executive Stephanie Lacer. I think News Corp has been a company that's been pretty outspoken about how it feels about its relationship with companies, especially Google, in terms of it being a gatekeeper in how information is distributed. That's a company that I would definitely keep a close eye on in terms of how they react to any outcome in this case.
All right, we'll have to have you back on the show when the dust starts to settle. Lauren, thank you so much for joining us on Decoder.
Thanks for having me.
I'd like to thank Lauren for taking the time to join the show and honestly for sitting in a courtroom listening to ad tech testimony for several weeks. I'd also like to thank you for listening to Decoder. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about the show or really anything else you'd like us to cover, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com.
We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on threads on MattReckless1280. And we have a TikTok. Check it out. It's at DecoderPod. It's a lot of fun for as long as it lasts. And I have to tell you, the TikTok ban lawsuit is just kicking off now. So we'll cover that soon as well.
If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Community Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Kylie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.