The fate of Google’s search business now rests in the hands of Judge Amit Mehta as closing arguments in the landmark trial got underway on Friday.
The Justice Department and plaintiff states made their final arguments Thursday about Google’s alleged anticompetitive behavior in the general search market, and on Friday focused on its alleged illegal conduct in search advertising. Google has also been criticized for failing to preserve chat messages that the Justice Department said may be relevant to the case.
The government is trying to show that Google has locked down key distribution channels in the general search engine market so that potential competitors do not develop into a significant threat. The company says it does this by signing contracts with phone manufacturers and browser companies to be their exclusive default search engine. If a judge agrees that Google successfully eliminated competition in that market, he could consider the government’s arguments about the search advertising market as evidence of anticompetitive behavior.
Kenneth Dintzer, a lawyer at the U.S. Department of Justice, said in his summary that the last major technology monopoly decision, United States v. Microsoft, “fits like a glove” on Google. John Schmidtlein, Google’s lead litigator in the case, disagreed.exist MicrosoftManufacturers are forced to make deals, while consumers are forced to accept inferior products they don’t want, he said. “Google wins with great products,” he said.
“The importance and significance of this case is not lost on me,” Mehta said at the end of Friday’s court proceedings. “Not just for Google, but for the public.”
Fully replace Google ads
If Google charges higher advertising prices, will advertisers choose suitable alternatives? The answer to that question could tell a lot about whether Google has the monopoly power the Justice Department claims it has contractually created that it must be the default search engine on a variety of browsers and devices. Google says advertisers have options; the government disagrees.
Mehta seemed sympathetic to the government’s point of view, even as he acknowledged that Google’s alternatives were powerful advertising companies in their own right. Mehta said Amazon, for example, is no worse than Google in advertising. Unlike wrapping a sandwich in newspaper instead of cellophane, Mehta said, “If you moved ad dollars from Google to Amazon, you wouldn’t be wrapping ads in newspaper.”
But Mehta later distinguished advertising platforms like Facebook and TikTok from Google. Users searching on Google have a strong idea of what they are looking for and almost spell it out in their query. Social media platforms often must infer this intent from indirect signals.
In 2017, Google conducted weeks of experiments and found that it could raise prices by 5% to 15% while still increasing revenue.
In 2017, Google conducted a multi-week experiment and found that it could increase prices by 5% to 15% while still increasing revenue. “Google gets to decide what profit they’re going to make. That’s why they’re running experiments asking, ‘How much revenue will we lose if we increase this by 15%?’ That’s something only a monopolist can do, right?” ” Schmidtling disagreed, saying it was fair to conduct pricing experiments to determine if they were pricing correctly.
“There is no evidence that Google ever considered competitors’ pricing for this purpose,” Mehta said. Schmidtling responded that it wasn’t that simple. Because ads are sold through complex auctions, even Google doesn’t fully understand the pricing mechanics behind them. This is nothing like a Coca-Cola representative walking through a grocery store to check the price of a Pepsi.
Breaking ads on Bing
The plaintiff states — 38 attorneys general led by Colorado and Nebraska filed the lawsuit along with the Justice Department — also argue that Google intentionally built certain features into its search engine marketing tool SA360 procrastination. SA360 helps advertisers manage ads across different platforms – not only Google, but also competitors such as Microsoft Bing.
States say Google has implemented SA360 features in Google search ads but has lagged behind in establishing SA360 features for Bing ads.
“The evidence here is a little tricky for Google,” Mehta said, noting that Google has publicly stated from the beginning that it “doesn’t take sides” when it comes to SA360. While Google could have chosen to exclude Microsoft from the tool from the beginning, “that was not the choice they made,” Mehta said.
The tool has yet to be delivered nearly five years after Microsoft requested it. “How can this not be at least inferred to be anti-competitive?” Mehta asked.
Deleted chat history
An unresolved question throughout the case is whether Google intentionally deleted or failed to preserve documents that could be used as evidence in this trial.
Google has a policy of “turning history off” in chat by default, letting employees decide when to turn it on for relevant conversations. The Justice Department’s Denzel called the alleged document destruction “unequivocal and truly shocking.” He added that there was “no doubt” that senior officials “deliberately conducted dialogue outside of history”.
“Google’s retention policy leaves a lot to be desired,” the judge said. He added disapprovingly, “I’m surprised that a company would leave it to its employees to decide when to retain files.”
“Google’s retention policies leave a lot to be desired”
Soon after, Dingze’s slide stopped at a slide that simply said “This is wrong,” and the Justice Department lawyer noted that Google had never apologized for not withholding the documents or promised not to do so again in the future. Do. He said courts must impose sanctions to show that the risk of destroying documents is not worth it. The Justice Department asked Mehta to draw adverse inferences against Google about any element of the case that he believed the plaintiffs did not have sufficient evidence for. This means that a judge will consider any deleted chat history to be detrimental to Google and suggest that there are anti-competitive intentions behind their contracts with manufacturers and browsers. The Justice Department also wants Mehta to view the destroyed chat logs as a signal of his anticompetitive intentions.
Google lawyer Colette Conner said the company’s lawyers informed Texas, one of the plaintiffs, about their retention policy early on. Dinzel said it was “obvious” that the Justice Department would have taken action if it had known about the disclosure, even if it had been months after the lawsuit had been stalled.
Mehta seemed unconvinced by Google’s defense. “What’s interesting to me is that Google has been very thoughtful – maybe after seeing what happened at Microsoft – very thoughtfully advising employees not to say anything,” he said. In employee training, the company recommends avoiding terms such as “market share.” (Bloomberg method It has been pointed out that this is a common practice among large companies.
Now it’s up to Mehta to decide how to interpret those absent chats. He did not provide a timetable for a decision, but in the meantime, Google and the Justice Department will prepare for a second antitrust standoff over ad technology in the fall.
