Google executives bragged to colleagues in 2009 that the goal of the company's nascent online advertising business was to “outcompete” rivals in the digital advertising market, according to evidence presented Wednesday in a major federal antitrust trial against the tech giant.
The Justice Department highlighted comments made by Google's former president of display advertising, David Rosenblatt, on the third day of a non-jury trial in which the company is accused of abusing its dominance of digital marketplace technology to siphon revenue from publishers and advertisers.
“We're going to be able to dominate other networks, that's our goal,” Rosenblatt said of Google's strategy at the time, according to documents viewed in court.
Federal authorities allege that Google operates a “trinitarian monopoly” by controlling the tools on the buy-side of digital ad transactions and the marketplace that connects companies with advertisers. According to the Justice Department's complaint, Google siphons off more than a third of every dollar spent through its ad platform.
Rosenblatt, who joined Google after its 2007 acquisition of the now-controversial digital advertising software company DoubleClick, bragged about the company's control over tools for every aspect of the advertising ecosystem, according to memos discussed in court.
“We are both Goldman and the NYSE. … Google has built the equivalent of the NYSE and the LSE. In other words, we are doing for display what Google did for search,” Rosenblatt wrote.
Rosenblatt also acknowledged that it would be a “nightmare” for publishers to try to switch to other advertising platforms, saying “it would take an act of God to make that happen,” according to court documents.
Brad Bender, a former Google executive who took the stand, said he had forwarded Rosenblatt's memo to his team at the time and found it “worth reading.”
Digital advertising makes up the majority of Google's total revenue, exceeding $307 billion last year alone.
The case will be decided by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who has blasted Google during pretrial hearings for implementing a policy to automatically delete employee chat records that should have been kept.
The Department of Justice has asked the court to break up Google's ad tech business, including by forcing the sale of its Ad Manager product.
Google argues that the Justice Department's lawsuit is based on a misunderstanding of how the digital advertising market works, and that if the court intervenes in the case, it risks disrupting the digital advertising market and empowering other rivals, such as Amazon and Meta.
The digital advertising trial is just the latest headache for Google: Last month, a federal judge ruled in a separate case that the company had an illegal monopoly on online search.
The Department of Justice is similarly expected to pursue breaking up Google during the remedial phase of the case.
With post wire
