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ALEXANDRIA, Va. (CN) — In a continuing court fight over the U.S. Department of Justice’s plan to divest Google of lucrative ad tech products, a former employee testified that the firm’s ad exchange and server could be moved to another employer within two years.
In her court appearance Friday, Goranka Bjedov contradicted the tech titan’s claims that such a task would be unfeasible.
“I’m just saying that 80 engineers can get this done,” said Bjedov, whose engineering credits include time at Google and Facebook. The engineers should be competent, she added, but “I’m not asking for geniuses.”
Her testimony was part of the ongoing remedies trial following U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema’s order that Google had violated antitrust laws. The first trial took place one year ago and explored the U.S. Department of Justice’s charges that the Silicon Valley giant engaged in a systematic campaign to seize control of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers and brokers.
The Justice Department attorneys are now asking Brinkema, a Bill Clinton appointee, to remedy Google’s antitrust violations with divestiture. They are targeting the AdX exchange, a digital marketplace for purchasing and selling online ads, and DFP, Google’s ad server.
In court records, Google’s attorneys described divestiture as catastrophic and unwieldy, writing “Divestiture of either AdX or DFP is uncertain to succeed; would require tearing AdX or DFP from the Google infrastructure that currently makes them high-performing for millions of customers and hundreds of billions of ad requests a day.”
Bjedov, who left Google in 2010 after five years with the company, predicted it would take 18 months to move the ad exchange and 24 months to migrate the ad server. She explained that the actual time could be 15 months for the ad exchange, but she factored in a cushion. “That allows me to react when things go sideways,” she explained.
Before the trial began, Google’s attorneys, along with the legal team from Facebook, asked Brinkema to exclude Bjedov. They argued that Bjedov, who is listed on LinkedIn as a capacity engineer and a performance test engineer, is not specifically a software engineer. Brinkema allowed Bjedov to take the stand.
Separately, the judge heard testimony about another aspect of the DOJ proposal tackling Google’s conduct in online ad auctions — where businesses bid in a competitive online marketplace for advertising space.
The Justice Department wants Google to modify its ad server to separate the code that performs the final auction determining which ad to render on a page. Google would provide this code under an open-source license to industry organizations or participants.
Currently, Google has an edge and rivals can’t catch up. “You can’t innovate when someone is gaming the system. You can’t make decisions,” testified Michael Racic, president and board member of Prebid.org, a nonprofit focused on bringing conformity and simplicity to the bidding process.
This case is one of several ongoing legal matters involving Google. In 2024, a federal Washington, D.C. judge 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.
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