A Google executive boasted to colleagues that the goal for the company’s fledgling online advertising business in 2009 was to “crush” rivals in the digital ad market, according to evidence presented Wednesday in the federal antitrust trial targeting the tech titan .
The Justice Department highlighted remarks made by David Rosenblatt, Google’s former president of display advertising, during the third day of a non-jury trial alleging that Google abused its control of digital marketplace technology to siphon revenue from publishers and advertisers.
“We’re going to be able to crush other networks, and that’s our goal,” Rosenblatt said of Google’s strategy at the time, according to documents reviewed in court.
The feds allege that Google operates a “trifecta of monopolies” through its control of tools on the buy and sell side of digital advertising deals, as well as the marketplace that connects businesses to advertisers. Google spends more than a third of every dollar spent through its advertising platforms, according to the DOJ complaint.
In memos discussed in court, Rosenblatt, who joined Google after its now-controversial 2007 acquisition of digital advertising software firm DoubleClick, reportedly boasted about the advantage of controlling the company’s tools in all parts of the advertising ecosystem.
“We are both Goldman and the NYSE. … Google has created what is comparable to the NYSE or the London Stock Exchange; in other words, we will do to display what Google did to search,” Rosenblatt wrote.
Rosenblatt also acknowledged it was a “nightmare” for publishers to try to switch to other ad platforms and said it “takes an act of God to do that,” according to court documents.
On the witness stand, former Google executive Brad Bender told the court that he had forwarded Rosenblatt’s notes to his team at the time and described them as “worth reading.”
Digital advertising accounts for the majority of Google’s total revenue, which topped $307 billion last year alone.
The case will be decided by US District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema — who blasted Google during a pretrial hearing for enforcing a policy that automatically deleted employee conversation data it was supposed to keep.
The DOJ has asked the court to break up Google’s adtech business — including a forced divestment of its Ad Manager product.
Google has argued that the DOJ case is based on a misunderstanding of how the digital advertising market works. It also claims that the court would risk causing chaos in the digital advertising market and empower other rivals such as Amazon and Meta if it intervened in the case.
The trial of digital advertising is only a headache for Google. Last month, a federal judge ruled in a separate case that Google operates an illegal monopoly over Internet search.
The DOJ is similarly expected to pursue a Google division during the remedial phase of that case.
By postal wire
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