Lauren Feiner

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.

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.

Google economic expert Andres Lerner testified that in the world that would have existed previously but for Google’s anticompetitive conduct, Google would still have monopoly power. Yet he generally agreed that remedies should unfetter the market from Google’s anticompetitive conduct. Brinkema said that seemed “inconsistent with the concept that some monopoly power can continue. There’s a tension there.”

Google security engineering VP Heather Adkins testified that while AI can help “autocomplete” some code that might be useful in a forced migration Google’s ad tools, vibe coding doesn’t produce secure enough code yet to make it so that a human doesn’t need to be looped into the process.

Elizabeth Douglas testified in Google’s defense that breaking up the ad tech tools her business relies on would introduce immense uncertainty in the one part of her business that feels relatively stable in terms of set up. But Google’s AI overviews, she said, are also part of the reason for WikiHow’s uncertain future, since they often keep users from clicking through to its pages.

DOJ attorney David Geiger asked Goodwin about his claim that AT&T’s breakup slowed tech progress — was he also aware it accelerated the development of the cell phone? Goodwin said no, and Brinkema interjected, “yeah, but we lost Bell Labs. That’s what people comment on.”