Why Google is back in court for another monopoly showdown
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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.
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