Google and the DOJ just wrapped their two-week remedies trial until closing arguments on November 17th. Judge Leonie Brinkema is still holding out hope for a settlement to avoid the tricky technical issues of a court-ordered remedy.
That’s what Brinkema wanted to know as the case wound down. She wants the parties to consider what kind of committee should be appointed by the court. “That is part of the key of making whatever the final remedy is work,” she said. “I would be very concerned about any monitor who might have any stake in the outcome.”
Google brought back its technical expert Jason Nieh for a brief response to the DOJ’s rebuttal. Nieh claimed that Wheatland’s conception of how the open-sourced final auction logic would work was new and not technically feasible. Brinkema pushed back, saying that her understanding was that all that functionality is “already there” inside DFP and “all they want you to do basically is open the box.” Nieh said that wouldn’t work since the code is always evolving and it would be harder to stick back together with Google’s system.
If the court only imposes behavioral restrictions on Google, Daily Mail Chief Digital Officer Matthew Wheatland warned in the DOJ’s rebuttal, there would still be a “gray area on our decision making process” to switch ad servers since they’d need to be sure the remedies would have “lasting effects” on Google’s actions.
A court-ordered sale of Google’s ad tech tools could backfire on publishers, the company warned.
We heard more testimony from Google’s technical expert Jason Nieh this afternoon about why he thinks divesting AdX and DFP would be much harder than the DOJ’s experts said. On Monday, the DOJ will bring DailyMail.com chief digital officer Matthew Wheatland in to testify in its rebuttal case, and may add an expert or two.
Former News Corp ad tech executive Stephanie Layser worries that even if Brinkema limits Google’s bad conduct, it will simply find a new way to make things difficult for publishers in ways that will be hard to detect. Layser said she felt like a “conspiracy theorist” about her suspicions Google was harming her business — until discovery in this case.
