Breakup of Google's ad tech arm looms with upcoming trial

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (CN) — In a week, a federal judge will consider breaking up Google, divesting it of key pieces of its ad tech arm and possibly forever altering the way the tech titan does business.

Convicted of antitrust violations, Google has already proposed remedies for opening up the ad tech process. But the U.S. Department of Justice wants divestiture.

In a pretrial conference Monday morning, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema signaled that she would be listening to and questioning everything. The Bill Clinton appointee demanded to hear witnesses in real time — either on the stand or by teleconference.

“I want the witnesses live,” she told Google and DOJ attorneys. “I need to be able to directly pose questions.”

She denied a motion to exclude testimony from a witness Google hoped to block. And she made clear her aversion to redacted documents which, she griped, “make no sense.”

The coming two-week phase of trial opens a new chapter in the DOJ’s 2023 case charging that Google operated as a monopoly. Backed by 17 states, the department accused the Silicon Valley giant in a 150-page complaint of engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers and brokers to facilitate digital advertising.

The initial trial took place one year ago. In April, Brinkema issued an order finding that the Google’s conduct “substantially harmed Google’s publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web."

The judge also handed Google a partial victory, dismissing a portion of the government’s case challenging the tech giant’s monopolization of the advertiser ad network market.

During the upcoming phase of trial, set to begin Sept. 22, the DOJ wants to remedy Google’s antitrust violations with divestiture. Specifically, the government’s lawyers are targeting the AdX exchange, a digital marketplace for purchasing and selling online ads.

Google’s legal team took aim at a key government witness, Goranka Bjedov, a professor and technology expert whose LinkedIn page indicates a work history at both Google and Facebook.

The DOJ turned to Bjedov after being “unable to secure a qualified expert willing to support their desired remedy timelines,” Google claimed in a court filing earlier this month.

The tech company described Bjedov as “willing but unqualified to render opinions on the full timelines, and who admits to reaching her opinions before considering any record evidence, and without doing any of the requisite source code analysis or engineering work.”

Meta, which is not a party to the lawsuit, also objected to Bjedov, describing her in court documents as a high-ranking capacity engineer employed by Meta’s Infrastructure team between August 2010 and February 2019 who “would have had access to highly confidential and sensitive business information by virtue of her position and responsibilities.”

Brinkema advised Meta’s attorney to be present at the trial. If something the witness says veers into proprietary territory, “stand up,” the judge said, “we’ll have a bench conference.”

Google is navigating multiple, complex legal challenges, leaving a paper trail of depositions and documentation, some of which could potentially be used to impeach witnesses in the coming trial. Earlier this month, European regulators slammed Google with a €2.95 billion — $3.2 billion — fine over accusations the company abused its dominance in digital advertising technology.

The ad tech firm PubMatic also sued Google in federal court in Virginia, demanding $1 billion in damages and contending the tech giant thwarted its success.

In a separate case, a federal judge Washington, D.C. found the company violated antitrust law with its search business. But the judge also ruled that Google can keep major parts of its multitrillion-dollar company.