Google, the ad exchange, and the prosecution: how much do publishers have in the programmatic advertising world? Avery’s perspective on the case

By the end of the trial, Judge Leonie Brinkema will be able to decide which side is at fault and which side is in control.

Google’s attorneys poked at the witnesses’ arguments and credibility during cross-examination, pointing out ways players like Avery would benefit if the court forced Google to share access to its tools. Google will call its own witnesses to counter the DOJ later in the trial.

Speaking from the ad exchange perspective, Casale testified that switching ad servers is a big lift at the technical level, so publishers rarely do it. A new one is very complex and expensive. Casale said it was difficult to compete with AdX in the ad exchange market and that reducing fees had barely an impact on the ability to gain more business. Because of the huge network effects it takes to get an exchange off the ground, as well as the fact that it only gets visibility into ad impressions it wins, “I can’t imagine anyone starting a new exchange today,” he said.

The government says that some of the tools that Google has, hold about 90 percent of the market. Publishers can sell ad space with the help of the Ad Manager server from Google. It operates an ad exchange, AdX, that facilitates transactions. It also owns an advertiser ad network, which is comprised of major products across different parts of the ad world.

After opening statements, the DOJ began calling its first witnesses, focusing on the tools publishers use to monetize display ads. These are the ads that typically pop up at the top or the side of the page on news websites and blogs, populating through super-quick auctions that run while the page loads. During the auction, an ad exchange helps match publishers and advertisers based on things like topic and price without active intervention by a human. The process is called programmatic advertising, and it’s used by The Verge’s parent company Vox Media among many others. Ryan Pauley, the president of revenue and growth forVox Media, wasn’t called to testify today.

Google and the Ad Tech Trial: Consumer Experiences with Google, Publishers, and a Data-Driven Monotonic Competition Controlled by DoubleClick

To Google, the government is seeking control over a successful business by making it deal with rivals on more favorable terms, disregarding the value of its investments in technology and the unique efficiencies of its integrated tools.

All depends on the outcome of the case. Over the past year, the company lost two other antitrust trials. Though the verdicts are under appeal, they’ve made the company’s critics optimistic about the ad tech trial.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO of ad-buying software developer Viant Technology, which both competes and partners with Google, believes that consumers would encounter a greater variety of ads, fewer creepy ads, and pages less cluttered with ads. He says the browsing experience has been substantially improved.

That is a large amount. A government expert reckons that if Google was not ruining its own competition, the publishers would make hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Starved of that potential funding, “publishers are pushed to put more ads on their websites, to put more content behind costly paywalls, or to cease business altogether,” the government alleges. It all adds up to a subpar experience on the web for consumers, Colorado attorney general Phil Weiser says.

The government contends that controlling DoubleClick enabled Google to corner websites into doing business with its other services. That has resulted in a monopolizing of the three links which lead to $12 billion in revenue for websites and apps in the US alone.