Google exec says tech giant previously considered 'business divestiture'

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (CN) — In the shadow of global investigations into antitrust violations, Google employees studied divesting the company of some ad tech products, a Google executive testified Thursday in the remedy trial over the behemoth’s ad tech monopoly.

Dubbed Project Sunday and Project Monday, the two analyses focused on how Google might divest aspects of its ad programs, recounted Tim Craycroft, vice president and general manager at Google Advertising.

Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice called Craycroft to testify during the fourth day of the trial to determine how Google will be penalized for antitrust violations.

Craycroft, who started at Google in 2020, had been involved in some of the discussions at the time. The idea, he explained, was to have a “business divestiture” that would not involve the transfer of all assets.

Instead of migrating Google’s ad operation to another company, “it would be more like an instructional manual for duplicating AdX,” he said, referring to Google’s ad exchange. Buyers would not get a copy of Google’s source code but a reference explaining how the program worked.

Similarly, Google’s legal team has proposed more lenient “conduct remedies” to protect the tech titan. The company would make “real-time bids for open-web display ads from AdX available to all rival publisher ad servers," Google attorneys wrote in court filings.

The Justice Department’s proposal calls for divestiture of Google’s AdX ad exchange and phased divestiture of its DFP publisher ad server, but the conditions would be different: The company would migrate code to a new owner.

Attorneys for Google have characterized the government’s proposed remedies as severe and even unprecedented. Along with divestiture, the government’s legal team proposes that “Google be enjoined for a period of ten years from operating an ad exchange, or any product with similar functionality that transacts any open web display advertising.”

Google attorney Jeannie Rhee called this a “requirement to turn off the lights with respect to open display advertising.”

Blunt and defiant, Craycroft described the Justice Department proposals as naive, vague and incoherent.

“I don’t know how to make sense of it,” he said, when asked about the government’s plan.

Earlier in the day’s testimony, one of Google’s attorneys grilled a computer science professor who testified that the proposed migration of Google’s ad programs was doable.

Jon Weissman, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, had testified earlier in the week that it would be possible to migrate Google code to another platform.

But he hadn’t actually migrated code, as that wasn’t within the boundaries of his analysis. In addition, he said he didn’t know how long it would take to complete the project.

So, Rhee said, “Everything you said is just speculation.”

The Justice Department initially brought the case in 2023 and secured a win. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema – a Bill Clinton appointee also presiding over the remedy trial — ruled Google of operated part of its ad tech business as a monopoly.

The remedy trial kicked off Monday and the Justice Department will continue calling witnesses Friday.