Google offers more ad data to publishers at DOJ antitrust trial
Google is willing to share more data with publishers to remedy a court’s finding that the Alphabet Inc. unit illegally monopolized some advertising technology, a senior executive said.
Testifying at a hearing in Virginia federal court Monday and Tuesday, Glenn Berntson – an engineering director for Google Ad Manager – said the company would be willing to provide website publishers with the underlying data for how its ad server decides what online display ad to show.
Providing “publishers with these detailed insights, I think, is a good idea,” Berntson said Tuesday. “The specifics is something we’d have to explore.”
Berntson made the proposal while being questioned by lawyers for the Justice Department. He is testifying in Google’s defense at the start of the second week of a federal antitrust trial in which the government is asking the judge to force Google to sell off its advertising exchange and make auctions for buying and selling display ads more transparent.
The Virginia federal court in April ruled that Google illegally monopolized the ad server market, controlling a more than 90% share. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema also found the company illegally monopolized the ad exchange market.
Google Ad Manager
The Google Ad Manager product contains both the company’s ad server and ad exchange. An ad server acts as the brain of a website, determining where to offer advertisements, which ads to show, and tracking how the campaign performs for the advertiser.
The federal government, which filed the case in 2023, has asked the judge to require Google to make publicly available the auction logic it uses to determine winners. But Berntson warned that proposal was overly complicated and could harm publishers by changing the way that technology they rely on works.
Berntson said most publishers wouldn’t be able to understand if Google simply published the source code that outlines how the ad server makes its decisions. Instead, the company could provide technical documentation seeking to explain how that process works, he said. He acknowledged, however, that large publishers, who have more sophisticated advertising operations, and rival ad servers would likely want to see the underlying code themselves.
Publishers have long complained of the opaqueness of Google’s advertising products, with several testifying at the trial that how the company determines auction winners is a “black box.”
“We don’t know why the impressions land the way they do,” Grant Whitmore, an executive of Advance Local – a subsidiary of the Newhouse family’s Advance Publications Inc. overseeing local news – testified last week. “Its like a pachinko ball, we don’t know all the variables that are bouncing the ball around.”