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Ari Paparo
This podcast is brought to you by Luma Partners. A couple months ago, Luma used AI to create a fake ad with my voice in it. So we're going to play that ad now to save a couple of bucks. Here we go.
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Ari Paparo
I'm the real Ari Paparo and I approve that copy.
Alan Chappelle
Welcome to the Monopoly Report. The Monopoly Report is dedicated to chronicling and analyzing the impact of antitrust and other regulations on the global advertising economy. If you are new to the Monopoly Report, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter at Monopoly Market tv. I'm Alan Chappelle and I'm excited to be taking over the reins here at Monopoly Report. And I'm of course joined by our fearless leader, Eric Pipero. Hey Eric, how you doing?
Ari Paparo
I'm great. How are you doing, Alan?
Alan Chappelle
I'm doing great. My eyes are hurting. I've spent much of the last 12 hours reading through, I don't know, a thousand or so pages.
Ari Paparo
Sounds like a job for ChatGPT.
Alan Chappelle
You know, there's a thing about lawyers using Chat GPT too often, they tend to frown upon that. So.
Ari Paparo
Yeah, well, they frown upon lawyers too. So was. Why don't we tell our audience what we're talking about? What thousand pages?
Alan Chappelle
So just last night both Google and the Department of Justice and I guess joined with them the multiple states who are suing Google for antitrust in the Google Ad Tech case. But anyway, they've. They've just filed last night their respective post trial proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law. You can find them from our friends at Check my ads. They've got a wonderful repository. They've got all that stuff. You can find it on Court Listener or you can read the Monopoly Report newsletter tomorrow and I'll tell you all about it or you can just continue listening.
Ari Paparo
I think by the time this launches it will be tomorrow. So it'd be right now. Check it out right now. Monopoly Report. Monopoly. So I'm sorry, we have an announcement before I Get started. We forgot our housekeeping. We have a new website, so the podcasts are now available, all of them@monopolyreportpod.com easy to remember. Monopolyreportpod.com you can subscribe, you can go to YouTube, you can do whatever you want. Very helpful. And then the newsletter remains at Monopoly. Marktecher tv. Thank you for allowing me my little plug.
Alan Chappelle
All right, fantastic. And great job putting together that site area. I appreciate it. So, you know, what are we talking about here? I mean, is there anything new as far as you can tell, or is this really just maybe the last ditch effort of both the parties to provide their best argument to the judge in front of what, three weeks or so from now, they're going to do their final oral arguments?
Ari Paparo
Yeah. So the judge required this. She told both parties they had to do this to get their final findings of fact in. In advance of the final closing arguments. Closing arguments are the Monday of Thanksgiving week. I will be there. I will write the newsletter that week and give everyone my pithy understanding of what happened there. And that's in advance of what the judge has said she wants to do, which is to give a final judgment by the end of the year. I think the judge specifically said on the stand that she wanted to get these final findings of fact because she will have pretty good idea about what she's going to judge by the time the oral final arguments are made. So the judge is coming in with a loaded gun and she's got a lot of ammo now.
Alan Chappelle
Yeah, I mean, we're really at the point where everything is just sort of being polished. I mean, I think most of us have a pretty good sense of at least where this trial is going. I think I would be shocked, just by way of example, if Google were to prevail here. But I don't think that's the end of it. I think there's going to be an appeal and an appeal of the appeal, and we could still easily be talking about this a couple of years from now. But this is the last effort of the parties to be able to, you know, make their best case in front of the judge and maybe change the judge's mind on a couple of points.
Ari Paparo
Yeah, it's possible. It's also worth noting. And Alan, please keep me in check when I give legal opinions, but when you appeal a verdict like this, we don't know what the verdict is. With the verdict will come. The appeal. Can't debate the facts anymore. The facts are the facts and the appeal can. Can talk about the process and the findings, but the facts are, are in stone, right?
Alan Chappelle
Yeah, that's pretty much the case. And, but, but there's, there's a whole bunch of things that I think they're still jockeying over right now, which is, you know, what's the relevant market definition? You know, Google is, is trying to say that everything that's digital, that touches an ad seems to be the same market. And is. Is effectively comparing, you know, TikTok and how the Wall Street Journal approaches their ad business the same. And I think some of those arguments make a little bit of sense. I think some of them border on preposterous. But that's the argument that I think Google is trying to make.
Ari Paparo
I think it's interesting that the government is claiming three monopolies. DFP, Adex and Google Ads. And the TikTok argument is totally insane when it comes to DFP. For example, if you think of DFP as a product, which I think most people do, and publisher ad servers as a market, which, I don't know, it seems like a market to me, they have 90% market share. You can't switch. And TikTok has no bearing whatsoever. Neither does Facebook, neither does even Amazon. So it would be shocking if DFP was not considered a monopoly in the final report. But if you then think about Google Ads, on the other side of things, Google Ads absolutely does compete with Meta and with TikTok and with everybody else. And so maybe there's an argument there that's a lot more palatable.
Alan Chappelle
I could be. And, and I, I think that when, when comparing the buy side and the sell side, the buy side has a ton more elasticity. Like if you're Coke. You know, I, I'm overstating this a little bit, but you don't really care. If you can get, you know, good results on TikTok, you're happy. If you can also get good results on the New York Times and the Washington Post, you're also happy. And, and if, if TikTok shuts down like we talked about in a previous podcast, well, okay, then you'll just go across the street to the other venue. But I don't think that really works in the. From the perspective of a publisher.
Ari Paparo
No. Maybe it's a little bit analogous to the financial markets where a publicly traded stock chooses a single exchange to be traded on and they're locked into that. Whereas on the buy side, you can buy from hundreds or thousands of different paths to the exchange. Maybe it's not a perfect analogy, but it sort of resonates a little bit for me.
Alan Chappelle
Yeah, I think that makes sense. And what's your take on just the overall arguments? You know, I now have having, you know, maybe walked away from this for a month now coming back to it and just looking at the comparative, you know, narrative that the DOJ is trying to spin versus what Google is trying to spin. Do you have any thoughts just regarding like, you know, overall I don't think.
Ari Paparo
It'S changed that much. Google's number one argument is the market definition. That the market definition includes other stuff. So therefore the actual market share numbers are much lower than the government's saying fine, we already talked about that. And then they have these two other arguments that are a little more legalistic and maybe you can address them. But the two arguments that they're bringing up are the duty to deal and the two sided market situation. So the duty to deal effectively what they're saying dumbed down is that the customers may have wanted Google Ads to interoperate with other exchanges and other ad servers, but they had no actual obligation to do so. And in the trial the Google witnesses put up some compelling evidence that it was expensive and time consuming to do integrations with other parties and that it wasn't economically feasible or worthwhile to do it. So that was the duty to deal. And the second argument is this two sided thing where basically they're saying if it's a two sided market like adx is and one party is a monopoly but the other party benefits from that, then it's kosher, it's okay, that's not a, that's not a violation. So that's really their case, those three things.
Alan Chappelle
Right. Okay, so let's talk about the duty to deal just for a minute. I mean I think it is not illegal to refuse to deal with another company. There's some exceptions to that where you're being discriminatory in certain cases. But generally there's no rule that says company A has to deal with company B or company C. But the way that Google is positioning this, it's sort of the duty to deal rule swallows everything else so that it's almost be impossible for there to be a tie in case if you adopt Google's definition of duty to deal.
Ari Paparo
Right.
Alan Chappelle
And, and so that's just on its face is a little, a little problematic.
Ari Paparo
What about the Amex two sided market thing?
Alan Chappelle
Well again even that only holds water if you buy into Google's definition of market in the first place. If, if you, if you disagree that, that the whole thing is bundled as One market. Then I think Google's whole argument becomes a little bit, a little bit harder to make. And you know, the DOJ and their brief goes into some detail basically saying that like Google's making up the two sided market idea from whole cloth and, and that it doesn't really exist anyway. So they're kind of calling BS on Google here. And first, first my, my read.
Ari Paparo
So former guest on this long running podcast, Jason Kent, he's really worked up about the findings that Google's employees were hiding or destroying evidence. And it is mentioned in the DOJ document today as repeated mentions of witnesses saying things like oh, let's take this offline or let's turn off history and then have this conversation, that sort of thing. How big a deal is that?
Alan Chappelle
I think it's a really big deal and I'm going to go in a little bit different direction because I think that it plays very, very nicely into the larger narrative that the DOJ is, is trying to create here. I mean they're basically saying okay, Google has set out to dominate the market as witnessed by multiple emails and witness testimony. Okay, great. They did so by a variety of anti competitive techniques such as buying and parking potential competitors. Remember we had Terry on a couple of weeks ago tying their products and manipulation of auctions. So three, Google's actions evidence more concern for maintaining their monopoly than serving their customers. And then four, which is I think gets to your original question here. Google hid and probably destroyed evidence, used and used questionable legal tactics in order to shield their plans from discovery. And so I think it's a big deal in and of, in and of itself, like on its own it's a big deal that all that stuff happened. But I think it really plays into the narrative that like there's sort of this consciousness of guilt thing taking place.
Ari Paparo
Yeah, it definitely looked bad on trial, but this is the sort of thing where you really have to be a professional to understand whether it matters or if it's just nitpicking. I have a little sympathy for Google on this one. I'm just going to take Google aside for one second. You have an organization with 20 50,000 employees that touch on this issue of ad tech insensitivity. You want to have frank conversations, but absolutely anything you write down or chat about is going to be taken out of context and made you look like you're a gangster. So what do they do? They say what they say. Don't say these words. Don't say monopoly, don't say market share. That's pretty standard device. And then they have this chat that they use, which is I guess our equivalent of Slack, but they use it internally to Google and they set the default to history off. And they tell their employees like, hey, if you're having an important conversation, turn history on. And lo and behold, no one does that. Like, because why would you do that? Like, I mean, oh, we're about to say something incriminating. Let's take notes on the criminal conspiracy. No, it's just like it's an impossible burden to ask these folks to put everything in writing knowing that their careers could be a jeopardy if they say the wrong thing.
Alan Chappelle
I think that's a fair argument, but I do think you're being a little soft on them because there are certain rules that are imposed pursuant to litigation and one of them is there are certain evidence that you were supposed to hold. Now they failed to do that. And in litigation you really aren't allowed to say oopsie.
Ari Paparo
Well, but they didn't delete anything. There was no, there's no evidence. They went in and said, hey, delete all your emails or chats that are on bad subjects. They just didn't collect things.
Alan Chappelle
Okay, but they didn't set up. I mean, I feel like we're going to have this like ethical, what's a lie? If is a lie of omission is still a lie. And like, I don't know here.
Ari Paparo
Well, if the same conversations had happened in the hallway, no one would be having this argument. But they happened on a chat system that does not capture its history.
Alan Chappelle
Yeah, but you know, if there's ever a company that should understand how default settings work, it's Google, isn't it?
Ari Paparo
Yeah, I sort of get that. What I found interesting, and maybe this will prove different. I haven't been through every single piece of evidence that's in the locker. I've been through a lot of it, but not every single one. And I found that there was a distinct lack of documents that documented actual senior level decisions about what to do. There was a lot of situations where there was a document from a product manager or an email back and forth. A whole bunch of mid level people having this argument like, oh, is our rate too high? Our rate's too low. What should we do about it? What should we do about it? And then nothing would happen. And then six months later they would actually do something about it. And there was no connecting tissue that would have like Sundar say, hey, you have to do this. Or even someone a lot lower in the org, Neil Mohan, or someone like that. And there was even testimony, I think Jonathan Belloc's testimony when he talked about header bidding was that he was told that he had to make header bidding the solution to header bidding just better than header bidding. He couldn't make it much better. And the follow up question wasn't asked like, told by whom in what document? There is no document, there's no one. When someone's emailed Jonathan, like, hey, you have to cripple your header bidding solution because we want to keep our advantage. So the lack of smoking guns is itself maybe a smoking gun, in my opinion.
Alan Chappelle
Yeah, maybe that speaks to the fact that the more senior people were a little bit more wary about how the default settings worked and.
Ari Paparo
Yeah, or they didn't put anything in writing.
Alan Chappelle
Yeah, well, and also, I mean, there's so much stuff in here even still that seems to be redacted. So like I find myself chasing down rabbit holes of, okay, wait, why did this happen? And oftentimes you end up leading you to some documentation on Witness X, who, it turns out three quarters of her testimony seems to be redacted.
Ari Paparo
Yeah, I mean, don't know why. I mean, when they. There were quite a few read ins of testimony during the trial, they were incredibly brief where they had obviously spent hours with a product manager like Sam Cox or Apurna Papa, I think is her name. And then their actual testimony was less than 5 minutes on anodyne subjects. And I just wonder what else did they say? Was it just repetitive so there was no reason to read it into evidence or is there objections? I guess we don't know.
Alan Chappelle
Yeah, it's hard to say. I mean, I think that the DOJ clearly was gunning for expediency over detail. And oftentimes, even if you're dealing with a judge, I mean, just getting the primary points through, you know, is enough. And maybe, you know, had they spent twice the amount of time, you know, in court and gotten an extra 10% of detail, would that have been more helpful or less helpful to the DOJ's case?
Ari Paparo
Right. So a couple of things to talk about here, which is, first of all, the DOJ left a lot of things out of its case on purpose. In the press we've heard about Bernanke and Global, Bernanke and Jedi Blue and all these things which were headline grabbing and they just weren't in the case. They just decided not to bring them as accusations, presumably because they weren't unique facets to the Monopoly case. Maybe I'll leave it to you, Alan. Like what do you think about that? Is that normal that you would leave some accusations out that were meaty?
Alan Chappelle
Well, it's a great question. It might be that the separate state AG case was the better forum for that type of stuff and they just wanted to let all of that out there. And it wasn't like, it wasn't like what they shared wasn't pretty meaty. So it's, it's, there's always going to be a strategy here hopefully anyway. And I, I get this sense that cancer and the folks over the DOJ were, were, were, you know, did this for a reason. Even, even if, even if we had their information, we might have gone in a slightly different direction. That stuff was left out for a reason. My guess, they thought that the, the separate state case had a better bite at that particular apple.
Ari Paparo
I think the state case is going to be frothing at the mouth on some of this stuff. It might be a little more dramatic. There was also some talk in the press box about whether the cases that both sides brought were originally intended for a jury. And as the close listeners will know, Google got rid of the jury a couple months before the trial by paying off the entire claim of the government plaintiffs. So that I don't know why that necessarily led to the jury being removed, but somehow through some mechanism it did and it ended up being a judge trial which they thought would be more beneficial. And so the implication is that both sides presentations were kind of dumbed down to be more dramatic and jury friendly than sort of technical.
Alan Chappelle
Yeah, I think that's right. Although I also think, boy, if you know, the judge is certainly a very smart lady, but boy, that's a lot of information to encompass on a very arcane topic really quickly. And so maybe the dumbed down version was for the best, even if you aren't going to a jury.
Ari Paparo
Yeah. The judge did say a couple of things that made you wonder if like her understanding was as deep as we thought it was. You know, she said something like, oh, is this like if I'm putting up a paddle in an auction and then someone else gets to bid after me? Like, yeah, that is what it's like. But that's, I would think we would have covered that on day one, not on like day 15 of the trial. But she has clerks who are doing the hard work for her. So I think they'll have a pretty good understanding.
Alan Chappelle
I would agree. One thing I noticed, Google, it came out at least I had noticed it before. So maybe this was in every single filing up to this point. But the, the DOJ made what I thought was a big deal over a flip flop of Google where the apparently in a different district court case, Google had made the exact same argument about market definition as it pertained to Google as the DOJ is making in this case. And so DOJ was sort of jumping up and down and saying, hey, that's a huge flip flop. That isn't, you know, that isn't how it's supposed to work. You got, you know, you're not being consistent. And therefore I think it calls into question the credibility of their market definition in this case.
Ari Paparo
That's interesting. Was that the Oregon case?
Alan Chappelle
I think it was Oregon, although I was searching through about half an hour ago and I wasn't able to find this specific case. I'll try to dig it up.
Ari Paparo
I don't know anything about that, to be frank. I know it came up and there was a bit of a loud argument about it, but I don't remember the details.
Alan Chappelle
Well, what made me smirk as I was reading through that this morning was, I don't know if you remember the Google had a blog post with respect to the epic case against Google and they were, Google was jump out, jumping up and down saying, hey, here is a different case with the same facts and we got found guilty and Apple did not. Yeah, fair. That's not fair. And I thought for a minute that there was sort of a, you know, what's good for the goose, good for the gander or whatever argument you want to make there. But I thought that that made me smile a little bit.
Ari Paparo
Indeed. The courts are not fair. That's pretty accurate. Yeah.
Alan Chappelle
Who says there's no irony in the law?
Ari Paparo
So I didn't read these thousand pages. I literally did send them to ChatGPT and I am just astounded. I mean, no one needs to listen to this podcast to hear good things about AI, but like in a minute it compared to 500 page documents and gave me a pretty accurate summary of. I will just say a couple things that it pointed out. So I asked it to compare the pretrial document from Google with the post trial document from Google and it broke it out into five sections and gave me their analysis of what changed. I think the most interesting thing was the antitrust law interpretation where according to ChatGPT, in the first filing most of it was about establish antitrust principles against market gerrymandering for litigation advantage. And in the second one it was much more heavily on legal precedents like Trinco and Lincoln related to tying. Did you see Any of this, that they were kind of changing the way that they were approaching the legal side.
Alan Chappelle
Yeah, I wouldn't even say it was a change. I would say it was a slightly different point of emphasis. And that sort of makes sense because if I'm Google's outside counsel and I'm thinking, thinking back to what happened, you know, a month, month and a half, two months ago, and you think about, okay, well what are the points that we probably under emphasize that we now really want to drive home to the, to the judge. And I think that, you know, Trinko would be being one of them because again, it's not even about this decision for Google. It's about like what you can you make sure is on the record so that when you, you know, assuming you do lose this, when you lose this, you know, are those grounds for appeal?
Ari Paparo
Right, grounds for appeal. So another thing is that the DOJ's write up seems to put a little more weight onto admld than was before the case. The ADMLD acquisition and the, the feeling that it was somehow anti competitive. And this is increasingly interesting to me because in the past week I have spoken to Ben Brokins, the founder of admld as well as a couple of their biggest customers and I've asked about this and no one seems to find the admld acquisition problematic at all in the market. These are the people who are frothing at the mouth about things like header bidding and they're like admold, yeah, sure, it's a good company, got bought, no big deal. Like that's really the reaction for everyone. I'm yet to find anyone who feels like they were personally hurt by the admuld acquisition. I'm out there, I'm listening. If you reach out to me if you got screwed over somehow, but I.
Alan Chappelle
Can'T find it Right, but isn't that an example of look, you know, Google went for, you know, from a level six market power to a level seven and a half market power. And so some of that, you know, difference might not necessarily be measurable or even palpable to somebody. And heck, if you just. If you ask me how I feel about the $400 million company that I just sold, I would imagine, I would say I think it's great.
Ari Paparo
So anything. Ben was thrilled. Ben doesn't have the single bad thing to say about Google. I think you're right about the 6 to 7.5 analogy because Admel didn't have majority market share of the emerging market for yield management SSPs. It was a leader, but it was one of five, probably. And the acquisition didn't give Google any structural advantage it didn't have previously, and they didn't really do much with it. So it seems like it's just like a bump in the road.
Alan Chappelle
Yeah, that was sort of my read. I thought it was interesting that the DOJ seemed to be making it a larger point of emphasis in this one. But, you know, they mention it more often in this filing than I think in the. In the previous one, what, a month, month and a half ago. So, you know, that's certainly a larger point of emphasis. But of the things that Google allegedly did, I personally didn't think the ADMLD thing was the biggest thing either.
Ari Paparo
No, I didn't think so at all. I think. I think Jedi Blue is interesting because it was removed from the Texas case, and then Jason Kent keeps insisting it's back in, but I've seen no evidence that it's actually back in. So, Jason, if you have a document saying the Jedi Blue's back into Texas, I want to see it. I don't want to hear about how you saw Sheryl Sandberg in the Dallas airport. I want facts. So, anyway, so Jedi Blue got kicked out of that one, and it also wasn't in this one. And yet it seems pretty fishy that Facebook basically abandoned header bidding and went for open bidding and paid 5% more for some guarantees of quality. I know it's sort of moot because they're not in the display market anymore, but it definitely seems like it's a bigger deal than it's been given on the courthouse stage.
Alan Chappelle
Yeah. Yeah. And on a related note, I thought Google made a really big deal this time through about many of the witnesses on behalf of the DOJ were competitors of Google's, and that they were just. They wanted Google to, you know, turn their tools into a public utility or, you know, to. It almost had, like, the air of, like, commie.
Ari Paparo
The commies. It's the ad tech commies. I love that. I love the commies. It did come up in trial. Like, three different witnesses said, oh, well, it should probably be a public good of some kind. And I was like, what's going on? There's creeping socialism in the Virginia courthouse.
Alan Chappelle
Well, but. But it's funny, and I wasn't in the courthouse, so you probably have a diff. Different color than I do. But just in reading the documents, as I went through it, it felt like it was very much based on a particular context. And in the context of header bidding, you could say As a publisher, listen, we had built this cool thing.
Ari Paparo
Yeah.
Alan Chappelle
Google forced us to tear it down. They built something that wasn't as good, and they started charging us for it. And what we want is the thing that we built for free that was owned by the community.
Ari Paparo
Yeah. They didn't force them to tear it down. But other than that, I agree with that characterization. They built something that was advantageous, but in a way that would benefit them. And then they took away their ability to price it in a smart way. And if you could say it was illegal, you could say it was not illegal, you could say it was good, you could say it was bad. But there's no argument that it was arrogant. And when I talk to publishers about those moments, that time period of the unified auction and all that rollout, it's like the feelings are gaslighting. Arrogance, loss of trust, loss of whatever business relationship these people had, and that's sort of irreversible.
Alan Chappelle
Well, it's funny you say that, because this was one of my final points as I was reading through this. I've dealt with Google like you have for a long time, and often there's this sort of googly way of explaining things to you, and that some of it's gaslighting, some of it's this weird bizarro Ted lasso thing that a lot of them do. Like, a lot of them do that.
Ari Paparo
Wait, wait, what Ted lasso thing?
Alan Chappelle
Ted Lasso? Well, it's super friendly and they make, you know, the kind of jokes and they're very likable. And yet. Yet at the end of the day, you're kind of screwed.
Ari Paparo
Right? That's absolutely what happens.
Alan Chappelle
But what I've noticed is that Google seems to be taking that same approach here in the core system, and I don't think that's going to work for them.
Ari Paparo
No, they are very much taking that approach.
Alan Chappelle
And I find that odd because this isn't their first rodeo when it comes to the lens legal process. But they literally seem to be. They seem to be taking the identical approach here as they are, like at an IAB Tech Lab event or somewhere where they curate the audience and make sure there's no dissenters, and they set up the agenda in a way that you can only characterize things a certain way or whatever. Anyway, you can't do that in court, and it seems like that's what they're trying to do. Nonetheless.
Ari Paparo
Well said. The Ted lasso thing, I'm going to use that. All right, we're out of time. An amazing emergency episode. It wasn't really that much of an emergency. It's just some documents. We will be back with a guest next week. We have Don Marty from Raptive, who is also part of Mozilla. And we talked in depth about browsers and everything about browsers. That's exciting. And just a reminder, we have a new website, marquitecturereportpod.com which is really nice and easy to find any of our episodes. So check it out. Alan, thank you very much.
Alan Chappelle
Thanks so much, Ari. Safe.
Podcast: The Monopoly Report
Host: Ari Paparo
Co-Host: Alan Chappelle
Release Date: November 6, 2024
In Episode 5 of The Monopoly Report, host Ari Paparo and co-host Alan Chappelle delve deep into the latest developments surrounding the antitrust trials involving Google, specifically focusing on the updated findings of fact presented by both the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Google. This episode offers a comprehensive analysis of the courtroom strategies, key arguments, and the potential implications of the trial's progression.
The episode begins with Ari and Alan discussing the recent submissions by Google and the DOJ in their ongoing antitrust case against Google's dominance in the ad tech sector.
They highlight the enormity of the trial, mentioning that both parties have submitted extensive documents—over a thousand pages—that will influence the judge's final judgment.
Ari outlines the current stage of the trial, emphasizing that the judge has mandated both parties to provide their final findings of fact in preparation for the closing arguments.
Alan speculates on the trial's trajectory, expressing skepticism about Google prevailing and anticipating a protracted appeals process.
A significant portion of the discussion centers on the contested definitions of the relevant market in which Google's dominance is being scrutinized. Google argues for a broader market definition, encompassing various digital ad platforms, while the DOJ maintains a more restrictive view.
Ari counters by highlighting the government's stance on Google's monopolistic control over specific ad technologies.
The hosts dissect Google's primary legal defenses: the duty to deal and the characterization of the ad tech ecosystem as a two-sided market.
They explore how Google contends that they are not obligated to interoperate with other ad exchanges and that the ad tech market inherently supports a two-sided dynamic that mitigates monopoly concerns.
A critical highlight of the episode is the DOJ's assertion that Google employees may have concealed or destroyed evidence pertinent to the trial.
Ari sympathizes with Google's position, suggesting that managing internal communications within a vast organization might inadvertently lead to such issues.
However, Alan counters by emphasizing the gravity of these allegations within a legal framework, where maintaining transparent records is paramount.
Ari shares an innovative approach by leveraging ChatGPT to summarize and compare the extensive trial documents, highlighting shifts in Google's legal strategies between pre-trial and post-trial filings.
This segment underscores the evolving role of artificial intelligence in legal analysis and information processing.
The conversation touches upon specific instances like Google's acquisition of ADMLD and the exclusion of Jedi Blue from certain cases. Ari notes that stakeholders within the ad tech community do not view the ADMLD acquisition as significantly anti-competitive.
Alan adds that while the DOJ is emphasizing the ADMLD acquisition more in current filings, its practical impact remains minimal.
Ari and Alan critique Google's courtroom tactics, likening their approach to the affable yet ultimately untrustworthy character Ted Lasso. They argue that Google's friendly facade masks underlying aggressive legal maneuvers.
This characterization reflects a broader sentiment of frustration and mistrust toward Google's legal strategies.
The episode wraps up with Ari announcing an upcoming guest, Don Marty from Raptive and Mozilla, who will discuss browser technologies. Additionally, the hosts promote their newly launched website, monopolreportpod.com, where listeners can access all podcast episodes.
Judicial Process: The trial is nearing its final stages, with both Google and the DOJ presenting their comprehensive findings to influence the judge's decision.
Market Definition: A central debate revolves around how the ad tech market is defined, impacting perceptions of Google's dominance.
Legal Strategies: Google's defense hinges on the duty to deal and the two-sided market framework, which the DOJ challenges as insufficient to counteract anti-competitive behavior.
Evidence Handling: Allegations that Google may have concealed or inadequately preserved evidence significantly undermine its credibility in the trial.
AI in Legal Analysis: The use of AI tools like ChatGPT highlights new methods for digesting and interpreting vast amounts of legal documentation.
Community Sentiment: Stakeholders in the ad tech industry largely view certain DOJ claims, such as the ADMLD acquisition, as overblown and not reflective of market realities.
Courtroom Dynamics: Google's personable yet evasive courtroom demeanor has fostered skepticism and frustration among observers.
This episode provides listeners with an in-depth understanding of the intricate legal battles shaping the future of big tech's role in the advertising ecosystem. By dissecting the latest filings and courtroom tactics, Ari Paparo and Alan Chappelle offer valuable insights into the potential outcomes and long-term implications of the Google antitrust case.