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.
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.