That’s how Google Ad Manager engineering director Glenn Berntson described the difference between a divestiture of AdX that excludes Google’s proprietary infrastructure versus one that includes it. Both are huge undertakings, he said.
Brinkema said she’s thinking about whether she needs to consider different classes of publishers, since those of various sizes have different needs. Some small publishers, for example, may make deals with local businesses for advertising, while others may use Google’s tools only for programmatic ads.
Google executives say the products the DOJ seeks to pull apart are global in nature, and span and types outside of this case. Google product management director George Levittw testified that the DOJ’s request would be “the most complicated and risky project that I have seen in my time at Google.”
The company’s attorneys have so far called up three different executives who are making the case that a break up would be far more complex than the government portrayed.
Equativ CEO Arnaud Creput testified the French order “had no impact at all” on publisher ad server competition. That was partially because the three year remedies period was too short for publishers to execute a complex move. The DOJ wants a ten year monitoring period.
Brinkema denied in part Google’s motion to exclude testimony from French ad tech provider Equativ about their experiences with a French regulator’s orders to encourage more competition. She said she is interested in “whether Google would comply” with a court order only focused on behavioral changes.
The DOJ continues its case-in-chief today, where we expect to hear the rest of the testimony from technical migration expert Goranka Bjedov, as well as testimony from another Google ad tech rival.
As long as Google still has the means and incentives to accrue dominance, the DOJ argues, it will likely do so again.
Bjedov was flummoxed by a question from Google’s Jeannie Rhee about whether a buyer of AdX could make the product worse. Even after working with “clowns” in the past, Bjedov finds this scenario hard to imagine.
That’s the takeaway from Bjedov, who said that Google executive Craycroft’s distinction of a “business divestiture” from a full technical divestiture doesn’t sound meaningful. She said the purely instructional reference code he mentioned is exactly what she’d look for to do a migration.