Google doesn’t just have one monopoly within ad tech—it has a hold on the entire supply chain.
That was the argument Justice Department attorney Julia Tarver Wood made Monday during opening statements in what could be the antitrust (and ad tech) trial of the decade, which kicked off this week in a federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia.
“One monopoly is bad enough, but a trifecta of monopolies is what we have here,” Wood said.
Marketing Brew got a seat on the packed press bench for the first day of the historic trial to hear opening arguments from both sides and the perspective of publishers, ad-tech executives, and advertisers about Google’s influence on the ecosystem—as well as their explanations of core concepts of advertising to Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, who is presiding over the trial.
There were lawyers in crisp suits and reporters who were not, and all managed to survive the day without cell phones or laptops close at hand, as this particular courthouse bans most devices outright.
The arguments: Tarver Wood argued that Google, “not just a noun, but a verb,” has monopolized specific parts of the ad market, harming both publishers and advertisers in the process. Weedy topics like header bidding and ad servers aside, this is “a real market affecting real people,” she said, emphasizing that Google controls 87% of the US ad-selling market.
Karen Dunn, Google’s lead lawyer (who’s also been busy lately preparing Vice President Kamala Harris for tonight’s presidential debate), opened by pointing out how competitive the ecosystem is, and that Google fights for dollars against competitors “millisecond by millisecond,” she said. She also argued that real-time bidding was as revolutionary as AI is today. (We’ll let the proverbial jury decide how persuasive that argument is.)
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And both legal teams tried to drill down the definition of “open web display advertising,” with Google’s team claiming that the DOJ’s definition has too many carve-outs, like whether it includes mobile app advertising or native ads.
The witnesses: Publishers were up first. Tim Wolfe, SVP of revenue operations at Gannett, took the stand as the government’s first witness and was asked to literally circle and point to an example of a banner ad. Wolfe was also tasked with defining industry terms like “CPM” and explaining how ad servers work.
- Wolfe said that Gannett couldn’t avoid using Google’s ad server because of its exclusive access to Google’s ad exchange, a key component of the DOJ’s complaint.
- In a cross-examination, Google’s lawyers pointed to an ads.txt file to show how many different ad-tech companies Gannett publishers work with beyond Google.
Andrew Casale, president and CEO of the supply-side platform Index Exchange, was up next, and he detailed his company’s experience competing directly with Google. Because of Google’s scale, lowering Index’s take rate had a “nominal at best” impact on his business, he said.
To give an advertiser’s perspective, Joshua Lowcock, former global chief media officer of the IPG agency UM and current president of the marketing agency Quad, took to the stand to explain the marketing funnel and the difference between brand and performance advertising.
Rounding out the day was James Avery, founder and CEO of the ad server Kevel, who testified that he had to shift his business completely away from traditional publishers because of Google’s dominance.
“It wasn’t a market we were going to be able to win,” he said.