Google owns the most powerful ad-serving business used by
publishers to sell advertisements, the most powerful tool used by advertisers to buy them, and the largest exchange where the auctions are run.
Lawyers for the U.S. Department of
Justice (DOJ) claim that when combined, those tech tools allow Google to keep 36 cents on every ad dollar that goes through them.
Last week, the company finished making its case in the
Department of Justice’s lawsuit related to some of its advertising technology, and on Friday recapped the arguments made during the trial as well as the conclusion.
Google
tried to prove through testimony that regulators who say Google holds an illegal monopoly over the technology have underestimated the competition such as Facebook and TikTok.
In a wrap-up
posted on Friday, the company explained that the DOJ tried to describe marketers that really "don't exist" and "ignored important ways that ad buyers and sellers buy and sell ads.
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"The
DOJ had to hypothesize a market limited to banner ads on websites," in trying to show Google has market power, Lee-Anne Mulholland, vice president of regulatory affairs at Google, wrote. "But
that blinkered definition misses many other types of display ads, let alone all the other places people see ads -- in apps, on social media and on connected TV."
Ben John, CTO at Xandr
(following Microsoft's acquisition), testified its integrated ad tech platform transacts across a range of digital advertising surfaces and formats.
Mulholland explained how Google’s
ad-tech fees are lower than
reported industry averages. Yale Professor Judith Chevalier explained that "using Google tools actually has a lower revenue share” compared with competitors’ full stack average revenue
shares, and it is on average “less expensive to use Google-to-Google compared with
third-party-to-third-party tools to connect advertisers with publishers.
The DOJ also has to invent a market for “open web display advertising,” but many witnesses acknowledged
they had heard the term only in the context of this lawsuit, and never in the real world. The DOJ’s expert witness testified that the combination of the four words is not commonly used. Index
Exchange CEO Andrew Casale testified that putting the four words together is not common.
"In reality many digital ads are not sold on ad exchanges and most publishers don’t use
Google Ad Manager," Google wrote. "Direct deals, where ad buyers and sellers bypass an exchange entirely, make up 70% of all digital ads spending. As our employees testified, our products help
advertisers and publishers streamline traditional, manual negotiation by incorporating features that come from the programmatic or the real-time bidding world."
Still, Google said, the DOJ
excluded direct deals -- even those using ad tech tools -- from its alleged markets.
Google also explained how the DOJ ignored AdSense, which publishers use much more often than Google Ad
Manager, and DoubleClick For Publishers (DFP) Small Business, even though these tools, as Vice President of Global Partnerships at Google Scott Sheffer explained, also enable publishers to monetize
inventory and provide access to Google Ads advertiser demand.
In the end, Google believes that the DOJ missed "the forest for the trees," referring to the "intense competition in ad
technology. Buyers have plenty of choices.
Mark Israel, an economist who prepared an expert report on Google’s behalf, said the government focused on a narrow market in which it
defines as “open web display advertising” -- essentially banner ads that appear on the top and along the right-hand side of a web page -- and fails to account for a variety of competition
beyond those boxes.
It also failed to account for the advertisers that now spend budgets on Reddit, TikTok and on retail networks such as Amazon, Walmart and others.