Google is misunderstood, its attorneys say in antitrust trial

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (CN) — Firing back against claims by the U.S. Justice Department that Google operates its ad business as a monopoly, a witness Monday described the mammoth search engine as acting in the best interests of publishers.

“Innovation is at the heart of this business,” said Nitish Korula, a research scientist and engineering director for Google. “It’s a rapidly changing business. We keep looking for ways to make products better.”

Korula described how the company walks publishers through the process of monetizing their websites and determining the kinds of ads appropriate for their brands.

His testimony launched the third week of the antitrust trial before U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, a Bill Clinton appointee. The Justice Department’s case, made in a 150-page complaint filed in 2023, accuses the Silicon Valley tech firm of engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers and brokers to facilitate digital advertising.

Throughout the trial, witnesses have opined about the various types of bidding that are part of the ad process in the web industry. Korula was questioned about header bidding — defined in court papers as a technology through which publishers can solicit and receive bids for their ad inventory. Header bidding is a partial workaround to Google’s ad tech restrictions, according to court filings.

Asked if Google put limits on header bidding, Korula responded, “we don’t have any limits of that nature.” Even so, Google developed a different method called open bidding, which prosecutors described as a “Trojan Horse that Google used to further cement its own monopoly power.”

In open bidding, according to court filings, other ad exchanges can purchase publisher ad inventory, but only by paying Google a 5% revenue share fee, providing key bid data with Google and “restricting the demand used to compete in the auction.”

Korula said Monday that he thought open bidding was “better at addressing publisher needs.”

The tech giant’s attorneys also pushed back against the government’s narrative that publishers had no choice but to use Google’s services. In testimony and depositions presented to the court, witnesses said that Google must compete for business. During a deposition read into court record, Ben John, a Microsoft executive, told lawyers that his company was able to “migrate customers” away from Google.

The government rested its case Friday. It is now up to Google to convince Brinkema that the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust division lacks a thorough understanding of the world in which Silicon Valley executives live. The judge snapped at Google attorneys Monday, scolding them for presenting repetitious witnesses and “loading up the record with documents.” But previously, she also told government attorneys that their case needed fine tuning.

Justice Department attorneys have asked the court to order the divestiture of Google’s Ad Manager suite — including both Google’s publisher ad server and Google’s ad exchange. Separately, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled in August that Google had operated an illegal monopoly over internet search.