A Google executive spoke in 2009 about the company's goal of “outdoing” competitors in the digital advertising market, according to a federal antitrust case against the tech giant that focuses on the company's control over the ad tech industry.
of New York Post Reports On the third day of a non-jury federal antitrust trial targeting Google, the Justice Department presented evidence showing bold statements from former Google executives about the company's strategy in the digital advertising market, where the company is accused of abusing its control over digital marketplace technology to siphon revenue from publishers and advertisers.
According to documents reviewed in court, David Rosenblatt, Google's former president of display advertising, told colleagues in 2009 that the goal for the company's growing online advertising business was to “outcome” rivals in the digital advertising market. “We can beat the other networks, and that's our goal,” Mr. Rosenblatt said.
The Justice Department alleges that Google operates a “trinitarian monopoly” by controlling both the buy-side and sell-side tools in digital advertising transactions and the marketplace that connects companies with advertisers. The complaint alleges that Google embezzles more than a third of every dollar spent through its advertising platform.
Rosenblatt, who joined Google after it acquired digital advertising software company DoubleClick in 2007, reportedly bragged about the advantages the company would gain from controlling the tools in every aspect of the advertising ecosystem. In a memo discussed in court, he wrote, “We are Goldman and the New York Stock Exchange. … Google has created the equivalent of the NYSE and the LSE. In other words, we are doing for display what Google did for search.”
The former Google executive also acknowledged that it was a “nightmare” for publishers to try to switch to other ad platforms, saying, “It would take an act of God to make that happen.” Brad Bender, a former Google executive who testified as a witness, forwarded Rosenblatt's memo to his team at the time and said it was “worth a read.”
Digital advertising makes up the majority of Google's total revenue, exceeding $307 billion last year alone. The case, to be decided by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, comes after the judge criticized Google during a pretrial hearing for implementing a policy to automatically delete employee chat records that should have been kept.
The Justice Department has asked the court to break up Google's ad tech business, including forcing a sale of its Ad Manager product, but Google argues that the Justice Department's complaint is based on a misunderstanding of how the digital advertising market works and that court intervention could create chaos in the market and empower rivals such as Amazon and Meta.
The antitrust case is just one of several challenges facing Google today: In a separate case last month, a federal judge ruled that the company had an illegal monopoly on online search. The Justice Department is expected to pursue breaking up Google in the relief phase of that case as well.
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Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering free speech and online censorship.
