Google contends it faces fierce competition from Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and others. It also argues that customers benefited from each of the acquisitions, contracts and features the government is challenging. “Google has designed a suite of products that work efficiently with each other and attract a valuable customer base,” the company’s lawyers wrote in a statement. A 359-page refutation.
For years, Google has publicly maintained that its ad tech projects would not harm customers or competitors. “We will be able to help publishers and advertisers generate more revenue, which will drive the creation of even richer and more diverse content on the Internet.” Drummond testified In 2007, US senators were concerned about the impact of the DoubleClick deal on competition and privacy. US antitrust regulators approved the purchase at the time. At least one of themIn retrospect, he said he should have blocked it.
Deep control
The Justice Department contends that the DoubleClick acquisition provided Google with “a captive pool of publishers who now had fewer alternatives and faced substantial switching costs associated with moving to another publisher ad server.” The global market share of Google’s tool for publishers is now 91 percent, according to court documents. The company has similar control over the ad exchanges that negotiate deals (about 70 percent) and the tools used by advertisers (85 percent), the court documents say.
Google’s dominance, the government argues, has “impaired publishers’ and advertisers’ ability to choose the advertising technology tools they prefer to use and has diminished the number and quality of viable options available to them.”
The government alleges that Google staff spoke internally about how they have been earning an unfair share of what advertisers spend on advertising — up to a third of every dollar spent in some cases.
Some of Google’s competitors want the tech giant to break up into several independent companies, so that each of its advertising services competes on its own merits without one favoring the other. Rivals also support rules that would prohibit Google from giving preference to its own services. “What everyone in the industry wants is fair competition,” says Viant’s Vanderhook.
If Google’s tech alternatives for advertising do win more customers, not everyone is so sure that users will notice the difference. “We’re talking about moving from the New York Stock Exchange 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 for investors (or, in this case, web surfers) won’t.
Some advertising experts predict that if Google is broken up, the user experience will get even worse. Andrey Meshkov, chief technology officer of ad-blocker developer AdGuard, expects increasingly invasive tracking as competition intensifies. Products may also cost more because companies not only need to hire additional help to serve ads but also buy more ads to achieve the same goals. “So ad saturation is going to get worse,” Beth Egan, an advertising executive turned associate professor at Syracuse University, told reporters on a recent call hosted by an advocacy group funded by Google.
But Dina Srinivasan, a former advertising executive who as an antitrust expert wrote A Stanford Technology Law Review article on Google’s dominanceadvertisers would end up paying lower rates and the savings would be passed on to their customers. That future would mark the end of the spell Google supposedly cast with its DoubleClick deal. And it could happen even if Google wins in Virginia. A trial in A similar demand The application submitted by Texas, 15 other states and Puerto Rico is scheduled for March.
