That’s what DOJ expert witness Goranka Bjedov determined. Bjedov worked as a capacity engineer at Facebook and worked on their migrations of Instagram and WhatsApp post-acquisition. She estimated the job would take 80 competent engineers.
Racic, whose Prebid aims to give publishers choice, said that even if Google’s AdX sunsets in a year, publishers could easily switch to other sources. Google’s attorney suggested Prebid stands to gain if it gets to operate the open sourced auction logic, and its members include Google rivals.
Michael Racic, president of Prebid, an organization that runs an open source ad tech solution, says that Google’s proposals would still benefit itself over publishers. The judge seems interested in Racic’s perspective on how open source ad tech tools can work, and whether the final auction logic in DFP can be open sourced.
Craycroft made this suggestion after testifying that potential buyers for AdX from Big Tech or existing ad exchanges could create new competition concerns. Brinkema picked up on this idea, asking, “why is that not a very simple and elegant solution?” Craycroft said it could be, but AdX offers some additional benefits.
Craycroft testified that the government’s remedies proposals are “naive” and “incoherent.” Despite its claims that breaking up Google’s ad tech business would give publishers more freedom, he testified, the DOJ’s proposals would burden them with a new tech tool to manage.
Google advertising executive Tim Craycroft testified that the company had done several internal analyses about potentially divesting part of AdX or even shutting it down altogether. The DOJ is trying to show that Google’s own analyses indicate it would be feasible to spin out the product.
During cross examination, Google attorney Jeannie Rhee walked through a long list of proprietary Google tools and asked Weissman if he found replacements for them outside of Google. Rhee is trying to complicate the picture of how simple Weissman says it would be to move AdX and DFP to another provider, suggesting there are many unknown variables.
That’s how Brinkema characterized a concern that moving the code for Google’s ad tech tools to a new environment could change how well they work. Court began today with the continuation of expert witness Jon Weissman, who says migrating AdX and DFP is technically feasible, and that any new code needed doesn’t need to be identical to Google’s, just equivalent in function.
Distributed systems expert Jonathan Weissman testified that separating AdX and DFP from Google’s infrastructure would not require a huge undertaking like a full rewrite of code. We expect to hear more from Weissman and others about the feasibility of a breakup tomorrow.