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ALEXANDRIA, Va. (CN) — Migrating Google’s ad tech source code is feasible, according to a computer science professor called upon to testify in a trial over the U.S. Department of Justice’s proposed divestiture of the tech giant’s ad tech arm.
“I took stock of what the project entailed, and this is definitely doable,” testified Jon Weissman, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He was indefinite when asked about the time it could take. “Time will be resourced commensurate with the project,” he said.
His testimony capped a day of witnesses offering technical expertise to U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who will decide how Google must make amends for antitrust violations.
Earlier in the day, another witness proffered that divesting Google of key components of its ad tech business could help restore competition to a market long dominated by the tech giant. Robin Lee, an economics professor at Harvard, testified about detailed economic analyses reflecting the possible beneficial impact of Google’s withdrawal from the ad market.
Between the lines of each question from Justice Department attorneys was an assertion that without divestiture, Google could re-monopolize, backsliding into antitrust behavior. A chorus of ad tech executives who testified previously agreed.
But Brinkema, a Bill Clinton appointee, raised questions about the premise that Google would inevitably backslide and glide away from an antitrust conviction unscathed. And she was skeptical about whether there was evidence the tech titan would defy an injunction.
”It’s a relevant factor to consider,” she said. “It has a huge impact on remedies.”
Google’s attorneys also pushed back against testimony by the government’s witnesses. Several of the experts “admit to having reached opinions about divestiture of AdX (Google’s ad exchange) and DFP (an ad-server) based on publicly available materials instead of evidence in this case, including without looking at the source code underlying AdX and DFP,” the attorneys charged in a court filing earlier this month. “The one technical expert who did review code did not review enough code to have an opinion on whether divestiture would succeed or how long it would take.”
Legal proceedings one year ago resulted in Brinkema’s order concluding that Google operates part of its ad tech business as a monopoly. Attorneys for the Justice Department and Google are again questioning witnesses as the judge considers penalties.
The antitrust case was brought by the Justice Department in 2023. The government’s legal team complained that competition in the ad tech space was “broken, for reasons that were neither accidental nor inevitable. One industry behemoth, Google, has corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising.”
The Justice Department wants divestiture, along with a mix of structural, behavioral and administrative remedies. Google’s legal team maintains divestiture is unfeasible and proposes “conduct remedies” instead. Attorneys argue this would address the violations and restore competition. News organizations, along with a cluster of dot-coms in Google’s ecosystem, are among the businesses that could benefit from changes in the ad process.
The trial continues Thursday.
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