Google’s US antitrust trial over online ad empire draws to a close

By Jody Godoy and David Shepardson

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department told a federal judge Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)’s Google illegally dominated online advertising technology in seeking a second antitrust win against the company.

The closing arguments in Alexandria, Virginia, cap a 15-day trial held in September where prosecutors sought to show Google monopolized markets for publisher ad servers and advertiser ad networks, and tried to dominate the market for ad exchanges which sit between buyers and sellers.

“Google rigged the rules of the road,” said DOJ lawyer Aaron Teitelbaum, who asked the judge to hold Google accountable for anticompetitive conduct and added Google is “once, twice, three times a monopolist.”

Another DOJ lawyer Julia Tarver Wood compared the case to the Charles Dickens novel “A Tale of Two Cities” and said U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema had to decide whether to adopt the DOJ or Google version of the state of the ad market.

Google lawyer Karen Dunn said DOJ had not met its legal burden and was asking Brinkema to disregard antitrust and overrule key precedents. “The law simply does not support what the plaintiffs are arguing in this case,” Dunn said.

She argued DOJ was ignoring Google’s legitimate business decisions and that the online advertising market was robust. The company argues the government had cherrypicked a narrow slice of the online market and did not account for aggressive competition.

Alphabet shares were up 1.4% in afternoon trading.

Publishers testified at trial that they could not switch away from Google, even when it rolled out features they disliked, since there was no other way to access the huge advertising demand within Google’s ad network.

News Corp (NASDAQ:NWSA) in 2017 estimated losing at least $9 million in ad revenue that year if it had switched away, one witness said.

If Brinkema finds that Google broke the law, she would consider prosecutors’ request to make Google at least sell off Google Ad Manager, a platform that includes the company’s publisher ad server and its ad exchange.

Google offered to sell the ad exchange this year to end an EU antitrust investigation but European publishers rejected the proposal as insufficient, Reuters first reported in September.

Analysts view the ad tech case as a smaller financial risk than the case where a judge ruled Google maintains an illegal monopoly in online search, and where prosecutors have argued the company must be forced to sell its Chrome browser.