At Google antitrust trial, documents say one thing. The tech giant’s witnesses say different
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The judge who must decide whether Google has a monopoly on the technology that connects buyers and sellers of online advertising must choose whether to believe what Google executives wrote or what they said on the stand.
The Justice Department is wrapping up its antitrust case against Google this week in a federal court in Virginia. The federal government and a coalition of states allege that Google built and maintained a monopoly about the technology used to buy and sell ads that consumers see while they surf the Internet.
Google argues that the government is unfairly targeting a very small part of the advertising world, namely the rectangular banner ads that appear at the top and right sides of a publisher’s webpage, and that Google is besieged on all sides by competition within the broader online advertising market, including social media companies and streaming TV services.
Many of the government’s key witnesses were Google managers and executives, who often tried to deny what they had written in emails, chats and company presentations.
This became particularly clear on Thursday during the testimony of Jonathan Bellack, a product manager at Google, who wrote an email that government lawyers say is particularly incriminating.
In 2016, Bellack wrote an email asking, “Is there a deeper problem with the fact that we own the platform, the exchange, and a huge network? The analogy would be if Goldman or Citibank owned the NYSE,” the New York Stock Exchange.
To the Justice Department, Bellack’s description is a near-perfect summary of his case. It claims that Google’s technology dominates both the marketplace that online publishers use to sell available advertising space on their web pages, and the technology used by vast networks of advertisers to buy ad space. Google even dominates the “ad exchanges” that serve as middlemen to match buyers and sellers, the lawsuit alleges.
Justice alleges that the Mountain View, California-based tech giant, through Google’s dominant position in all parts of the deal, shut out competitors and was able to charge exorbitant fees of up to 36 cents on the dollar for each ad impression served through its ad technology.
On Thursday, however, Bellack dismissed his email as “late-night, jet-lagged ramblings.” He said he didn’t think Google’s control over the buy-side, sell-side and middleman was a problem, but he did speculate about why certain customers were seeking solutions to Google’s technology.
Most other current and former Google employees who have testified for the government have also disavowed their own written words.
Earlier this week, another Google executive, Nirmal Jayaram, denied in large parts of his testimony the views he expressed in emails he wrote or in articles and presentations he co-authored.
The Justice Department, of course, argues that what Google employees wrote in real time is a more accurate reflection of reality. And it says there would be even more damning documentary evidence if Google had not systematically deleted many of the internal chats that employees used to discuss cases, even after the company was notified it was under investigation.
Testimony has revealed that Google implemented a “careful communication” policy that instructed employees to add corporate lawyers to sensitive emails so they could be marked as “privileged” and exempted from disclosure to government regulators.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema called Google’s document retention policy “grossly inappropriate and wrong” and noted it was something she took into account during the trial, though she did not impose a specific penalty.
The trial in Virginia began on September 9, just a month after a judge in the District of Columbia ruled that Google’s core business, its ubiquitous search engine, an illegal monopolyThat process is still ongoing to determine what legal remedies the court may impose.
The advertising technology at issue in the Virginia lawsuit doesn’t generate the same revenue for Google as the search engine, but it is still said to generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue annually.
The Virginia trial is moving much faster than the D.C. case. The government has been presenting witnesses for nine days and is nearly done with the case. The judge has told Google it can present its own witnesses on Friday.